Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris 

In a world where men have divorced their faith from politics, where the Bible isn’t recognized as a political-economic textbook for human liberation, and where modern Christianity has reduced salvation into an otherworldly yearning for heaven, many Christians have been able to compartmentalize their beliefs from such critical topics as politics. Thinking that Scripture doesn’t concern much more than spiritual or heavenly matters, they assume that their politics (ie., their theory of government) has nothing to do with their professed devotion to the Lord, such that they may hold any position they wish on one hand without running into conflict with their faith on the other, which is neatly tucked away in a different place in their mind. A man may be a “Christian socialist,” a “Christian nationalist,” or Christian-whatever, because the Bible isn’t thought to be civics textbook and because religion and politics are thought to be two different things. “Christianity” is just a religion; politics is something else. This is how we get people who say “Jesus is my Savior, Trump is my president.” The Lord is not much more to them than an afterlife soul-saver, such that they believe that it is permissible to seek human kings and kingdoms here on earth, and that that none of this interferes with one’s professed allegiance to God. They assume that their political philosophy needn’t align with their devotion to God, because they assume scripture doesn’t offer a political theology for their worldly ideas to even conflict with. In their mind, these are separate, neatly sealed-off matters that don’t present a problem with each other.

Since the Bible is seen as nothing more than a “religious” book concerning the fate of one’s soul in the afterlife, rather than a civics textbook of the path to liberation from the bondage of statists, it has been assumed that it is not only permissible to get your political ideas from the world, but that this is necessarily where one would have to go to find them, since the Bible doesn’t provide a politics. Thus, many men turn to secular political scientists, Greco-Roman philosophers, or worldly thinkers in general for their political views, who (no wonder they think this way) almost always preach a statist politics. They have not thought that they must make all things captive to Christ, including their politics. They have even assumed that Jesus-the-soul-saver was apolitical, leaving men to learn their political ideas from statists in the assumed absence of His teaching in this area. However, Jesus has instructed us to have no rulers who exercise authority over other people (Matt 20:25), which makes up the necessarily anarchist politics of Christianity that forbids Christ-followers from raising up false benefactors who lord power over other men.

So we have a situation where perhaps most people who call themselves Christians do not even have a Biblical or Christian worldview, because they never even thought that a Biblical worldview or politics was possible. By and large, most Christians have not seen a political theology in scripture. Again, the Bible to them is nothing more than a means of showing men how to get to heaven when they die or maybe some self-help book for the twists and turns of life. It has not been their guidebook for all of life, including one’s politics. 

Even though the scriptures are through and through a message about the Gospel of the Kingdom of God that stands in opposition to all worldly political kingdoms, many Christians have somehow or another missed it, whether by not reading the Bible themselves or being under the sway of false pastors who preach the false gospel of “salvation” through Roman-American systems. They rarely consider that there is a Christian politics at all and that it decidedly opposes the man-made kingdoms of this world — that Christian politics is effectively that we are to have nothing to do with politics as we colloquially understand the term to mean involvement with worldly government (eg., voting and advocating for human rule).

Anarchy and Christianity

As the title of this book suggests, Anarchy and Christianity (1988) by Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) seeks to demonstrate the compatibility of anarchist political philosophy and Christianity in a world that usually keeps such ideas neatly confined to the supposedly separate “realms” of politics and religion. The need for exploring this topic is rather obvious: Anarchism has largely been a secular political philosophy that rejects Christianity, and professing Christians have largely apologized for the existence and alleged need for a State (whether this has been taught as the perverted truth of false pastors or existing simply as part of an individual’s idolatry for men).

It is this unfortunate disconnect—God-hating anarchists and State-loving Christians—that Ellul makes some attempt to harmonize, not necessarily under the aim of proselytizing either camp, but for the sake of appealing to both anarchists and Christians to consider these ideas as compatible with one another.

The setting in which Ellul was writing in was thus one of a consensus that anarchism and Christianity are incompatible and wholly different ideas, an idea that endures today despite these terms being redundant (though there are probably more Christian anarchists today than there were at the end of the twentieth century when he wrote). At any rate, the majority of professing Christians are not anarchists, and the majority of people who call themselves anarchists are not Christians. What’s worse, most people of either camp tend to think the others’ ideas are antagonistic to their own, even entirely mutually-exclusive to one another. This is especially true among hardheaded “Christians” in America who often entirely lack any concept of exclusive allegiance to God, such that they believe they may pledge allegiance to men without contradiction. It is also the case with a majority of professing anarchists who either reject God outright of have neglected to find Him.

It is this seeming antagonism between Christianity and anarchism, as they have been practiced if not as they are truly, that provides the context in which Jacques Ellul writes. As he says, “It is taken for granted that anarchists are hostile to all religion. It is also taken for granted that devout Christians abhor anarchy as a source of disorder and negation of established authority” (p. 1). It is these fallacies—the idea that anarchism is not the politics of God’s prescribed social order or that Christianity is not an anarchist ethic of free souls under God—that he sees we need to cut through. 

The inescapability of Christian anarchism

These positions—godless anarchism or statist Christianity—that most men of either persuasion hold to are not valid, however, despite them being the dominant disposition of either camp. Most professing anarchists are “secularists” who reject God, and most professing “Christians” are statists who worship and praise the kingdoms of this world. In fact, they are both contradictions.

This is where I feel Ellul was not strict or harsh enough in his writing, which was more so an aim to lay a few points on the table and hope that Christians and anarchists might consider them. Statists are not Christians at all. There are only non-Christian statists and statist non-Christians. But Ellul doesn’t go this far to charge that statists are false converts who need to repent. While he, of course, is fond of a connection between Christianity and anarchism that he believes is there, he doesn’t quite go as far as to affirm that there cannot be one without the other. I find the truth here to be worthy of defending without compromise. There is no such thing as godless anarchism or statist Christianity. Statelessness without God, and Godlessness without statism, are both impossibilities. All deviations from God lead to statism, and all deviations toward statism are likewise deviations from God. There will be no anarchism without a people who make the Lord their King, and anyone who genuinely professes Christ as his King cannot hold to other, subordinate human kings at the same time; they must reject all human kingship for the divine Kingship of the Lord their God. Not only are anarchism and Christianity compatible, such that we could piece together strains of each that work together, but you can’t really have one without the other. “Christian anarchism” is a redundancy. “Christian statism” is a contradiction. “Godless anarchism” is a fantasy.

The aim of this book

Unfortunately, though he endeavors to show that anarchism is “closest to Biblical thinking” (p. 4), Ellul does not take a hard enough stance on this issue—the inseparability of Christianity and anarchism—in my opinion. Whereas he should show that there is actually no such thing as a “Christian statist,” he opts to just deliver what he sees as the Biblical facts and leave it at that. As he states his aims, “I am not in any way trying to tell Christians that they ought to be anarchists…my point is simply [that] they should not rule out anarchism” (p. 4). Also, “I am not trying here to show at all costs a convergence between anarchism and Biblical faith” (p. 6). Why not? Why allow for the idea at all that a Christian can be a statist when Jesus commands His followers to not operate like the archists of the world who rule over people by exercising authority over them (Mark 10:42-45)? What might seem as a respectable academic approach to the issue—just lay out the facts and see if people agree with it—may well also be seen as a soft, compromised approach to the truth. Again, “Christian anarchism” is a redundancy, not an attempt to blend two worldviews and find small, related ideas between the two. True Christians are anarchists. They have no King but Christ. The only reason we have had to qualify “Christian” with “anarchist” is that people have not understood what it actually means to be a Christian — to serve Christ as your one and only King. Those who accept worldly rulers as their “lords” and “saviors” and essentially profess “we have no king but Caesar” are not Christians; they are statists. There is a sharp dichotomy between Christian and statist that has no room for compromise. Either the Lord is your King, and you are a Christian; or men are your kings, and you are a statist. Christians cannot tow the line on this issue and halt between two opinions, as the prophet Elijah made clear. Then again, Ellul doesn’t even really cite any scripture until about page 50, half way through his book. So we can’t really expect for him to make a serious Biblical defense of Christian Anarchism here.

How did Christians miss it? 

He still addresses how curious it has been that these ideas are rarely explored though. The amazing thing when one first reads the Bible for themselves and quickly realizes what God is all about, is that professing Christians (mostly churchians who don’t really know God) are completely out of line with everything the Bible has to say. If you took their actions to be representative of Christ, you would believe that voting, apologizing for certain presidents or political parties, or hanging the empire’s flag on your home, is what authentic Christianity and the Bible is all about. Indeed, it is the statism of these millions of false converts that allows many atheistic anarchists and other non-believers in general to be turned away from God and His word, thinking that these “Christians” must be right that flying the flags of worldly empires and posting up pictures of their favorite political saviors are representative of the faith. (Could anyone imagine a first century Christian putting a Nero sign in their yard!?). Though it would be much more valid to point out (as scripture itself does) that these “Christians” are false converts who profess (praise) the Lord with their lips and deny Him in their actions, unfortunately the result is often just to throw out the baby with the bath water. Those who don’t know the Lord reject His entire existence and word because many of those who say they know Him are awful people who approve of the United States military and dropping bombs on children, when they should just point out that these people are not Christians at all. It would better to see that men who claim Christ but champion militaries, police, and wars are hypocrites, rather than to think this is what Christianity is all about. As Ellul saw, 

“I have never understood how the religion whose heart is that God is love and that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves can give rise to wars. They’re absolutely unjustifiable and unacceptable relative to the revelation of Jesus” (p. 26). 

After all, to turn men away from the Lord of the Bible by slapping His name on top of statist ideologies seems to be the intention and sinister nature of the false pastors and institutionalized “churches” of the world: to make men think that vain worship, various rituals, singalongs, sermons, icons, incense, robes, and other displays and shows, are what “religion” is all about, rather than the much more emphasized concepts in scripture of seeking justice, providing for one another freely and voluntarily, and having no other gods than the Lord our God. In this way, they can make people believe that one’s Christianity is defined by professing the Lord’s name or attending church on Sunday morning, rather than upholding the ethics of God and carrying out His Kingdom work. They are made to believe that an otherworldly escapism into heaven when we die makes up the whole of the Christian faith, rather than seeking the Kingdom of God and transforming society around us, such that one can count themselves a Christian as long as their soul is being saved into the afterlife, all while they take part in or advocate political atrocities on earth.

With everything being reduced to some religious, spiritual, or mystical notions about God, believers can be oriented into a defeatist, otherworldly thinking that pacifies them from any attempt to advance the Kingdom under the belief that there is nothing for us to do down here below. Happily, though few Christians will touch this topic in a world where most of them are waiting on the “end times” to arrive, Ellul attacks this hyperspiritualism that strips from God a socio-political ethics and turns men’s sights to the clouds rather than evangelizing and building on the ground.

“We must reject totally any Christian spiritualizing, any escape to heaven or the future life, any mysticism that disdains the things of earth. For God put us on this earth not for nothing but with a charge that we have no right to refuse” (p. 103).

It is these types of things that turns off onlookers from God — a purely heavenly-mindedness that makes men think that pure religion is the vain rituals they perform in buildings and that makes men believe they can forsake their duties to God or even engage in worldly politics. Who wants to be a Christian if being a “Christian” means idolizing men, putting them into power, and staking a lawn down of your favorite Caesar?

It is this illegitimate statism, in particular, which has plagued so-called Christianity for so long, that has been able to keep those who might see the truth from coming to know then Lord. Since statism—the ideological support for human government—is sinful and evil, those anarchists who rightly oppose it are then turned away from what they mistakenly believe is “Christianity” as judged by the “witness” of the those adopt that title and yet do not know the Lord. The flag-waving rampant in American evangelicalism works to make people with a sense of justice throw out God with their rightful criticism of the idolatry of these men who praise presidents and war-makers, all while God says that seeking justice and loving your neighbor is what actually defines His followers. The effect of these phony Christian statists is to keep good people from knowing the Lord by burying Him in flags and other worldly evils that He was never meant to be draped in. People see Catholicism, priesthoods, a political faith in men that is indistinguishable from the statist devotion to men among the average person, and are understandably turned off. Whether these things are practiced in error, or nefariously perpetrated to keep men away from the real Biblical truths of God, either way the dominant ideas or image of the majority of professing Christians (namely their statism) have played a role in keeping men away from God and corrupting the truth that is in His word: that God despises the flag waving fools who profess His name with their lips but in their hearts are far from Him.

Here, Ellul rightly places the blame on all the statists of a perverted “Christianity” who have (almost as a deliberate conspiracy in the institutional church) caused men to turn away from the Lord under the mistaken assumption that the often terrible people who profess to be His followers are genuine ambassadors of the faith — that flying flags of presidents and championing a military that bombs little children is “Christian.”

Given the utter statist perversion in Christian thinking, it is somewhat understandable the Ellul takes the approach of trying to unpack the fallacies rather than tell anyone what they must think if they wish to call themselves Christians. Rather than suggest that Christians must be anarchists, he is more interested in refuting or exposing the other side of the same coin, which is that the statism of professing Christians is not legitimate. He says, stating the main aim of his book,

“What, then, am I trying to do? Simply to erase a great misunderstanding for which Christianity is to blame. There has developed in effect a kind of corpus which practically all Christian groups accept but which has nothing in common with the biblical message, whether in the Hebrew Bible, that we call the Old Testament or the gospels and epistles of the new testament all the churches have scrupulously respected and often supported the state authorities. They have made conformity a major virtue. They have tolerated social injustices and the exploitation of some people by others, explaining that it is God‘s will that some should be masters and other servants” (p. 6).

Although the pages of scripture drip of the Gospel messages of the Kingdom of God and repenting from our association with the kingdoms of this world, this has not been the lessons taught or learned by the average Christian, who at best sees things as not much more than a path to heaven when they die, and at worst believes they must be involved with worldly politics to change society around them. The Biblical message of liberation under Jesus Christ and freedom under His jurisdictional kingdom—a necessarily anarchist message as far as our relation to the kingdoms of men and our neighbors—remains to be the bulk of scripture despite all the spiritualizing. It is thus a wonder how so many professing Christians haven’t seen it. The only possibilities are really that they didn’t want to see it and allowed their worldly ideology of statism to cloud their view of scripture, because they are idolaters of men who don’t want to repent; God has given them over to a reprobate mind for their evils such that they are unable to see it; they haven’t read the Bible and seen God’s striking condemnation of statist idolatry for themselves; or they are under the sway of false pastors who preached to them the doctrines of men (the greatness of the American constitutional system) rather than the precepts of the Lord.

At any rate, it has been a challenge to bring anarchists to Christ and so-called Christians to anti-statist thinking, as much as those who have eyes to see know very well that God hates statism and sends the rulers upon people as a judgment for the very wicked works of idolizing men and begging for human rulers (1 Samuel 8). Interestingly, it almost seems easier to lead a secular anarchist to the Lord than it is to lead a professing Christian to the anarchist political theology of scripture. The anarchist virtually already knows the gist of the politics of God but just hasn’t seen that it is His, while the Christian consumed by statist ideology has to see his way out of a false religion that he must confess to have fallen for against the teachings of the Lord. The former need only admit that they have been hardheaded and prideful all along to think they discovered anarchist liberty on their own, and accept the Lord thereforth seeing that God is the original anarchist; the latter has to admit that they have been a fake Christian all along who sought worldly rulers rather than the Lord as their King. It is much easier for the anarchist who has more or less understood the providential law order of God to confess that they have been a lost sheep adrift in the world who needs the Lord as their Savior, than it is for one who professes the Lord as their Savior to see that they have sought salvation in human government all along. It is much easier for the preexisting anarchist, who knows that human civil governments destroy society, to see this truth in scripture, than for the preexisting Christian to understand the anti-statist politics of God when they have long bought into the false religion of statism.

Of course, neither is guaranteed. People from both sides remain stubborn and hard-hearted, in need of the Lord to soften their hearts and reveal Himself and His divine natural order to them. Many anarchists refuse to know the Lord who has authored the law they loosely and partially accept on the one hand, and many Christians refuse to see their way of the Egyptian statist ideology they have bought into. But neither of them are beyond repentance and redemption either. Many anarchists have also seen that God is an anarchist and embraced the Lord as their King, and many Christians have also seen that they were in error and have backed away from the statist philosophy that other people made them think was compatible with their faith. It is not hard to discover these truths on your own, but they do require (for the Christian) that men turn away from pastors, churches, and seminarians for their ideas, as well as (for the anarchist) secular theorists, worldly political philosophers, and other Greeks and Romans. The truth is there for anyone who is willing to humble their hearts, pick up a Bible, and see for themselves what God is all about. As Ellul himself saw,

“The more I studied and the more I understood seriously the biblical message and its entirety (and not simply the ‘gentle’ gospel of Jesus), the more I came to see how impossible it is to give simple obedience to the state and how there is in the Bible the orientation to a certain anarchism” (p. 3).

The anti-statist Bible

Ellul brings up another point to which I have loosely written of here: That scripture is radically anti-statist yet was still published under these regimes and is still with us today (though not without some persecution), all while it threatens to turn these worldly systems upside down. This was one of the most amazing things to me when I first read the Bible: here is an anarchist manifesto that is not only on the bookshelves of perhaps the majority of Americans (and has been widely accessible to people for centuries now), and yet so few of them have seen that God hates statism! Any man, at any time, could pick up a Bible and see the prophets’ scathing rebukes of statism and related idolatries, but for some reason they don’t. Bibles collect dust all while our political captivity continues. Preachers in the so-called churches preach from it, yet manage to avoid the weightier verses (which outweigh the softer ones) and to avoid preaching on the captivity and consequences for the sin of statism, as did the Biblical prophets. Church marquees are more like to read how “love is patient, love is kind” than “woe to those who go down to Egypt” and trust in state militaries. Ellul too points to this phenomenon.

“The astounding thing to me is that the text were edited, published, and authorized by rabbis and representatives of the people…at a time when the kings in question were reigning. There must have been censorship and controls, and yet these did not prevent the writings from being circulated. Furthermore, the accounts were not merely preserved but were also regarded as divinely inspired. They were treated as a revelation of the God of Israel, who is presented as himself and enemy of royal power and the State. They were sacred texts. They were included in the body of inspired text. They were read in the synagogues (even though they must have seemed like anti-royalist propaganda to rulers like Ahab). They were the word of God in the presence of all the people” (pp. 50-51).

It might well be regarded as one of the most amazing things in the whole world that the anti-state nature of the scriptures have somehow—we can only assume providentially—been preserved in a world that has been dominated by statism and a need by these statists to uphold the accompanying ideology that fuels their regimes. He says of the prophets,

“Their writings, usually in opposition to power, were preserved, were regarded as a revelation from God, and were listened to by the people…the prophets stated unceasingly that that the kings were mistaken, that the policies they were perusing would have such and such consequences which had to be viewed as divine judgment” (p. 51).

If the Bible were really a tool of social control, as atheists think in their prideful belief that they are escaping all gods and masters, then we should expect the exact opposite: the Bible should be a word of incessant praise of human rulers, using God and His prophets to sort of rubber-stamp the statist narrative of men that “peace” and “freedom,” rather than disasters and famines, comes from seeking human rulers. (That “Christian statists” believe this shows just how much they have taken their ideas from the world rather than the Lord). Yet we get the opposite. We have a sacred, anti-statist text that demonstrates the opposite. We have an anti-Egyptian text that men regard as the Word of God (even if they don’t yet see the anti-Egypt part). If the Bible was really a tool of social control and legitimizing the regime, we should expect that the narratives of the false prophets would be pitched as Holy Scripture instead, rather than the rebukes of power from prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others. Again, we get the opposite. As Ellul points out, “None of the false prophecies that were favorable to the kings has been preserved in the holy scriptures” (pp. 51-52). If the thought-controllers were using the Bible to teach men how to believe in the worldly philosophy of statism, they could have chosen “better” (ie., false) prophets to defend their narratives. But this isn’t what we have before us, as anyone should see who cracks a Bible open. We have “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), how “it is better to trust in the Lord than to trust in princes” (Psalm 118:8), how all those who trust in Egypt, Pharaohs, armies, officers, shall eventually fall for that reason (Isa 30-31), and many other scriptures like it. The only thing about the Bible that works in favor of the ruling elite is that it mostly falls on deaf ears and isn’t read as God’s holy word, complete with a political theory of what type of Kingdom we are to actually be seeking, which, not being of this world of Roman systems, is a nightmare gospel to any rulers who must necessarily attempt to maintain the opposite narrative that salvation comes through presidents, congresses, militaries, and law enforcement agents. The statism of many false Christians is certainly not the actual content of scripture, which in a day could refute human kings as false gods if men sought the truth.

It’s understandable why people believe that the Bible must be a control mechanism for the rulers, being that it has—as we have argued amazingly—existed alongside them. People seem to assume that because what we call the scriptures have slipped through the regimes of the past centuries, that they must have contained a message that was apologetic, or at least not overtly critical, of the system of political power. Otherwise, how did it slip through? But this is one of the most amazing things about the Bible: it has made it through despite States, and it’s still an anti statist message. If the scriptures were meant to control people, the thought-controllers could have used the false prophets, telling everyone the king’s plans would see success. But the opposite has been the case. As Ellul says,

“The struggles of the true prophets have been preserved, however, and the fact that logically the royal authority ought to have suppressed them shows that we have in their declarations the Word of God. As I see it, these facts manifest in an astounding way the constancy of an anti-royalist if not an anti-statist sentiment” (p. 52). 

The prophets more or less preach one, unified narrative for anyone with ears to hear: that sin leads to bondage, that people go into captivity to men when they turn away from God and His commands, that a people will find themselves living as exiles under foreign rulers when they lust for the power systems of men themselves. And yet, for some reason, these great truths still await being unlocked by men who, in their hardheartedness, have either refused to see it when they read it or refused to turn to God for the truth that could set them free. What an interesting world, where the keys to God’s Kingdom that liberate men from the bondage of other men are right within every man’s reach, and yet men have still not unlocked it and escaped the tyranny of statism. This is probably why it’s too hard for naysayers to believe that this is actually the case. The Bible must contain no sort of anarchist message, or else it would have been suppressed, right? Yet this is one of the most stunning things in the world for an anarchist who reads the Bible for the first time. This discrepancy between the liberating word of God which exists as nothing but a freedom manual for leaving Egypt, and the Egyptian captivity that men remain in on the other hand, has been one of the most profound revelations of my life. I still can’t get over it sometimes. How is it that we have this Word, but have so few men who have seen it? It still remains profound to me every day that here is God’s civics textbook on why men become slaves to men, and here are slaves to men who who don’t care to see it or who still reject the Lord, even complaining about their bondage while turning away from the one who came to liberate them from it, our Savior Jesus the Christ. I could shake my head for the rest of my life wondering why God has left it this way: showing men the way, but giving us reprobates who won’t listen. I could awe for the rest of my days that God knows all about our political bondage, and yet somehow most men who claim to know the Lord don’t have the slightest clue about it. 

Bringing Christians and anarchists to the truth

The hardheadedness of so many professing Christians, who have been made to believe they can flirt with statism, patriotism, nationalism, or some other form of idolatry without running afoul of the Lord, makes it the case that the greatest mission field before us is so-called Christians themselves. They are the ones who refuse to know the ways of the Lord, who calls men to turn away from the systems of the world and the rulers of these kingdoms who they still praise. Strangely, they still need to absorb many lessons that anarchists can teach them, even though these anarchists also stubbornly refuse to know the Lord. And this is the general aim of Anarchy and Christianity: To show that anarchist criticisms of religion (so to speak) have been fair given the false statism within this perverted version of Christianity (even though, at the same time, those anarchists should realize they’re attacking a false version of Christianity rather than to think that flag-waving “Christians” rooting for blowing up Middle Eastern children represents the real thing). As Ellul suggests, 

“The condemnations of Christianity and the churches by anarchists ought to be a reason for Christians to achieve a better understanding of the biblical and evangelical message and to modify their conduct and that of the church in the light of the criticisms and their better understanding of the Bible” (p. 32).

Rather than neglect these criticisms because they are made by atheists, Christians should see that they could arrive at these same conclusions if they knew their Bibles better. In other words, they don’t need to become atheists; they could concede that the atheists’ criticism of a perverted Christianity (which they don’t see is perverted) are generally true and show rather that true Christianity is anarchistic, and to go even further, that true anarchism is Christian. Rather than dismiss the case for anarchism, it would be better for Christians to show the anarchists that their attacks on “Christianity” are misguided and should instead fall upon the institutionalists who make up these lies, not God or the Bible itself. As Ellul says, “[With] religion and power confused, the anarchists are right to reject religion” (p. 32). As Christians, we should show the non-believing anarchists how they have wrongly thrown out God and the Bible simply because many false prophets, who God always told us would exist, have perverted the truths of scripture (namely in their conflation of religion and power), and that the political theology of the Bible is anarchistic.

It is not hard to see where the anarchists who reject God are coming from, even though they are making a grave error of throwing out the baby—God and His word—with that indeed filthy water of blending Christ with the political plunder regimes. Most representatives of Christianity, especially in the United States, have fully bought into the religion of statism. They have praised presidents, they “back the blue,” they say “God bless our troops” as they murder innocents in other countries, they wave flags of empires, and they have failed to do the justice and welfare that God says he cares about more than anything. If one was to be tricked into thinking that this was Biblical religion, rather than the works of false converts in their sin and idolatry, they may be tempted to neglect God and His word altogether. Indeed, this is what happens all the time. There is no excuse for not investigating these things for themselves. Nevertheless, it is understandable why anyone with a sense of justice may conclude that they don’t care about God at all upon seeing their neighbor erect a shrine of the next president in their front yard while professing the Lord’s name.

To share some of my own story, I was also once one of these people who assumed there was no reason to even look into God or the Bible under this wrongful assumption that Christianity must be the bootlicking and love and praise of men and power of the many millions of people in this country who I now realize are false converts who don’t know the Lord at all. I had neglected to read the Bible for a very long time in my intellectual journey, having discovered only the secular anarchists (Rothbard, et al), who frankly (and even suspiciously) leave God out of the picture. I had assumed that the statism of most Christians was legitimate, that it must have also been what God had to say. Much to my astonishment, when the Lord turned me to the Bible I found that scripture is the most scathing rebuke of the worldly ideology of statism that has ever existed, and therefore, that most Christians are nothing more than false converts who don’t even know what God is all about and are nearly indistinguishable from the people of the world who have a god in the State. Now I realize—praise God for the eyes to see—that God hates statism, and that all Christians who adopt the statist political philosophy are frauds, and all anarchists who think that God is a statist have not yet seen the light either. There is, still to my amazement, a great discrepancy between what the Bible says and what professing Christians believe, so much that it is almost one of the great mysteries of the world how this discrepancy can even exist. So much so that the Lord has put my pen to paper to try and show others how strange this gap has been. Here stands God’s word on the bookshelves of more than half of Americans, and yet only a fraction of them have seen the anti-statism of the Lord. How great of a thing would it be if more anarchists discovered the Lord and refuted the contradiction of “Christian statism” and exposed these people to not be Christians at all, rather than take their word for it that God is a statist? How great of a thing would it be if Christians discovered anarchist philosophy and did the same to the false brethren around them? This, I think, is what Jacques Ellul hoped to reveal in Anarchy and Christianity: that both secular anarchists and statist Christians should listen to one another, and that anarchists should abandon their secularism and Christians their statism. 

The ever-present Christian anarchism

We might be tempted at a sense of pride ourselves for being one of the few people who see the anarchistic political philosophy of God in a world where professing Christians reject it for statism and where anarchists deny the Lord altogether. We may embrace the concept of being a part of God’s remnant with eyes to see and ears to hear in our time, so long as we temper this with a humility that reminds us that we have not come to these ideas on our own but have been shown them by God and the Holy Spirit. For as scripture says, there are no new ideas under the sun. Just as men have perverted truth in every way imaginable since the dawn of time, so have there always been men who still saw through the lies of the world and found their way to the light that is the Lord and His word. We are only part of a long line of men who have come before us, not the first to discover some hitherto hidden message of scripture that calls people out of the world and its institutions and commands that they do things a different way that the sword-wielding Romans whose method of “serving” others is by plundering and murdering men. 

As Ellul notes,

“There has always been a Christian anarchism. In every century, there have been Christians who have discovered the simple biblical truth, whether intellectually, mystically, or socially” (p. 7).

This should furthermore serve to rebut those who might propose that we are trying to invent something new in a Christianity that has had official, traditional, and established ways of thinking for thousands of years. Christian anarchism is not our idea; it is the pure religion of the Bible where the needy in society are to be provided for through voluntary charity and freewill offerings, as opposed to the legal charity of the Romans who exercise force over one another in a system of public religion that forces contributions from the people and punishes with the police club those who don’t “pay their fair share.”

Moreover, as Ellul shows with Constantine’s reign, this anarchistic position where militarism and power were condemned is the original position of early Christians like Tertullian; the statism and militarism, which is still plaguing men today, is the deviation. Thus, we are not just trying to revise Christianity and create some new doctrine by pointing to an anarchistic political theology, so much as we are only trying to return it to its roots that had rightly opposed these things from the start. It has been statism, not anarchism, that has been a corruption in Christian thinking — a perversion that distorts everything we know about God’s word. 

It should not then be thought that the idea of Christian anarchism is merely some edgy religio-political philosophy or attempt to be radical in the world for the sake of being radical, or that it must be wrong because it is not a popular take among the false pastors of the institutional church, seminarians, or trained theologians who essentially act as thought-controllers for the radical word of God that, for them and the people they serve, needs to be corrupted and softened. God has always left a remnant of believers to uphold these ideas in all the ages past, although few people have listened to them and hardly any popular men or celebrity pastors have repeated these ideas. Every generation has always had a handful of men who knew the Lord and came as prophets and apostles to those around them who they came into contact with, steering them away from worldly institutions and attempting to agitate others toward the Kingdom of God that knows no centralized political structure. As Ellul says again, 

“What I am advancing is by no means a rediscovered truth. It is always been upheld, but by a small number of people, mostly anonymous, that their traces remain they have always been there, even though they have constantly been effaced by the official and authoritarian  Christianity of church dignitaries. Whenever they succeeded in launching renewal, the movement that they started on the basis of the gospel and the whole Bible was perverted and re-entered the path of official conformity” (p. 9). 

The word of God is the truth that provides a key, through Christ, to free men from the political bondage that they have found themselves in. Naturally, the powers that be had to put gatekeepers in the way of this truth, so that the truth-seekers of the world would run into dead-ends and detours as they sought the truth, ideally never finding the Bible at all, but if they did, being steered into the hands of mainstream theologians, celebrity pastors, seminary professors, and false prophets who pretended to be Christians but who ultimately preached the gospel of Rome: that salvation comes through human government, police, soldiers, presidents, congressmen, legislative laws, taxes, and man-made institutions in general. Since the scripture, as the word of God himself, stands as the preeminent exposé of the nakedness of political rulers, as well as of the priests and academics that have functioned as its intellectual bodyguard, it was to be expected that thousands of men would be standing in the way of the truth, and that men in ages past would be burned at the stake for printing and distributing Bibles to people. For the Bible is a freedom manual, an anarchist manifesto, a political-economic textbook that reveals the kingdoms of this world to be bogus institutions that only impoverish and plunder men and leave desolate all those who seek these systems rather than the rule by God. When the rulers of the world find themselves incapable of ridding the world of the word of God, they send out false prophets instead to pervert it and otherwise keep people from coming to its main truths, namely that God hates statism, sees it as sin par excellence, and tells us to turn away from these systems and not make covenants with these false gods who set up “constitutions” that trick people into believe that liberty can be preserved through human institutions. This is why mainstream “Christian” circles are filled with Romans 13 propagandists who desperately seek any Biblical justification for their worldly statist politics that runs entirely contrary to the scripture, with some of them even being trained by the State itself to spin these narratives and trick men into accepting a Biblical cases for obeying men rather than God (Acts 5:29).

Statist perversions in the institutional church

Since the word of God is the truth and the truth shall set us free, it was necessary to manipulate the truth and put pretend Christians in the way of it who could represent official doctrine to the masses. This tactic was with Christianity from the start, but was a method that really picked up steam since the time of Constantine, whose “legalization” of Christianity in Rome—really its Romanization—would really help to secure it as bedfellows with the kingdoms of this world, which still today helps men to believe that there is no contradiction between serving the Lord and Caesar. Ellul traces this church-state arrangement, where the State supports the church and vice versa, to the time of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who to this day has helped it to appear as if there is no contradiction between Christianity and state power:

“From the days of Constantine the State has supposedly been Christian. The church has received great help in return. Thus the State has aided it in forcing people to become ‘Christians.’ It has given it important subsidies. It has safeguarded cultic sites. It has granted privileges to the clergy. But the church has also had to let emperors meddle in its theology, decide at times what must be true doctrine, summon councils, supervise the appointment of bishops, etc. The church has also had to support the State. The lines of throne and altar does not date from the Reformation but from the 5th century” p. 28). 

The ideas that American “Christians” hold today (eg., that there is no contradiction in Christian service to the State as a soldier, police officer, employee, or voter) can really be traced back to the corruption of Constantine and his rule. The early Christian’s views on war and service to the State, such as those of Tertullian who objected to the idea of a Christian soldier, would become tilted much more toward an alleged compatibility between ostensible Christianity and statism. Ellul notes how early Christians didn’t believe in fellowshipping at all with those who serve the institutions of the world: 

“The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, an official collection of church rules at the beginning of the 3rd century, says that those who have the power of the sword or who are city magistrates must leave their offices or be dismissed from the church. If catechumens or believers want to become soldiers they must be dismissed from the church, for they are despising God” (pp. 93-94). 

Can anyone imagine pastors telling people they must leave their churches today if they refuse to stop being one of Caesar’s police officers or soldiers? These men are positively praised today in the so-called churches, many which are adorned with the flag of the empire inside and outside them, with some even pimping out “thin blue line” flags in their sanctuaries. How different then is this pre-Constantine sentiment today from the fraudulent, so-called churches in America that celebrate soldiers and the military-police state by having their soldiers stand up for everyone to praise, trotting them down the aisles in their uniforms, or throwing events for all the statist holidays (Memorial Day, Veterans Day), to name only a few of their evils. But, Ellul notes, this would change dramatically into the Constantinian era of so-called “Christianity.”

“Thus at the Synod of Arles in 314, summoned by the emperor himself, the teaching on administrative and military service was completely reversed. The third canon of the council excommunicated soldiers who refused military service or who mutinied. The seventh canon permitted Christian to be state officials” (pp. 94-95). 

This was the beginning of fully stripping the anti-statist sentiment from Christianity that is evident in the word, the source of which we trace the false, “statist Christianity” back to today. With Constantine, 

“The State had begun to dominate the church and to obtain from it what was in basic contradiction with its original thinking. With this council the antistatist, antimilitarist, and, as we should now say, anarchist movement of Christianity came to an end” (p. 95). 

The “Catholic” institution in Rome has always operated in the same way, trying to define official doctrine, persecuting those who speak the truth as “heretics,” and steering people into the hands of priests who could keep them from the truth. Wherever the statists could not beat us or kill us, they joined us, watering down the message as they went and making it more acceptable to be a Roman while still giving lip service to being a Christian. If they couldn’t kill the prophets or keep the word of God from the people, they simply drowned them out with popular theologians or a priestly class that men assumed were better trained and more knowledgeable on the word, which they made out to be some esoteric, coded-text that only an exclusive club of people could understand and teach — as if you needed a degree to know what it means to “wash and make yourselves clean, take your evil deeds out of my sight, stop doing wrong, learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed, take up the cause of the fatherless, [or] plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:16-17) or that “your rulers are rebels,     partners with thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the fatherless; the widow’s case does not come before them” (Isaiah 1:23). Thus, many people who might have read their Bibles for themselves fell into the hands of priests who steer them towards rituals, traditions, and official doctrines instead.

Being that the word of God refutes all the claims that living under state rule is God’s will for people, rather than His punishment for refusing to be ruled by Him, it is no surprise that the religious institutions of the world had to swoop in as propagandists for the State, being that men might always discover it for themselves if they read God’s word on their own. The institutional church has always been used to spin apologia for the State and keep people from the truth of God’s anti-statist word. As Ellul says of the Eastern church, which is still true today with the Russian “patriarch” Kirill saying that dying for the Russian military on the battlefield can serve as a remission of sins, “The Orthodox Church is a prop for the regime” (p. 29). The same has always been true of the Roman institution, too. “We must not forget that under Hitler, if [the Roman Catholic Church] did not directly aid the regime, it did support it even in Germany. The pope even made a concordant with Hitler” (p. 30). This has always been the case with the so-called “church” throughout history, regardless of the evils of the regimes that they worked to prop up. Says Ellul, “No matter what the form of government, at the highest level and in its directives the church is always on the side of the state” (p. 30).

There is no reason that atheists should think the views promulgated by the institutional church represent the truth of scripture, or for Christians to think that they must defend them as if they constitute true doctrine. There is no reason that anyone should automatically conflate the ideas spread by the institutional churches (say, that kings rule by “divine right”) with the Bible, just because those claiming these things have an appearance of godliness or claim themselves to be “the church.” As Ellul says, “Anarchists are right to challenge this kind of Christianity and these practices of the church, which constitute an intolerable form of power in the name of religion” (p. 31). Sadly, without cutting through the fraud here, anarchists have accepted the propaganda and dispensed with God, while so-called Christians have bought into it and have not learned from anarchists who have been right to criticize the institutional church. Secular anarchists threw the baby (God) out with the bathwater of institutional religion, and professing Christians failed to criticize these institutions and arrive at an anti-state political theology on their own.

Again, however, to keep men from the inseparability of Christianity and anarchism has been the purpose of these institutionalized religions. To prevent Christians from knowing a God who hates statism and religious rituals, and to keep anarchists from knowing God at all, has been an unspoken aim of institutionalists everywhere who needed to prevent men from coming to the full truth that all Christians should be anarchists and all anarchists should be Christians. They have kept each camp isolated and weak, when they would be unstoppable if they saw the unity between the two. Anarchists have been ineffective at agitating for a stateless society because they have done so without the Lord on their side, and Christians have been almost indistinguishable from the masses of statist idolaters, whom they share ideologies and gods with. To keep a wrap on these things, to keep anarchist political theory and Christianity separate, has been necessary for all those who depend upon men believing that political power is necessary to society. It has taught Christians to believe human civil government is God’s blessing and gift to His creation, and it has kept anarchists from seeing that the only way to beat back statism is to make the Lord your King. It has taught Christians to neglect the real political theology of God, and has kept anarchists from seeing that the representatives of “Christianity” are lying with their (statist) political theology.

In another time, religionist institutions (eg., Catholics) just killed anyone who spoke against the religious regimes’ official doctrine. In our day, other tactics are needed to keep people from the truth. Since it would be unpopular to burn Bibles or humans in our time, and might even make men become interested in it as a banned book that has now been made taboo or interesting by persecuting those who posses one, it is better to just attempt to control what people think the Bible says, as well as what they think about the Bible itself. Thus you have tens of thousands of atheists who make no distinction between God’s word and man’s religious institutions and just assume that the Bible is just a book they produced to get people to believe in their worldview, when the Bible, much to the surprise of anyone who picks it up for the first time, will find that it condemns virtually everything about worldly institutions, from the State and its false gods to the quasi-religious organizations that dupe people with man-made traditions and make them believe God values rituals over liberty, justice, and service to others. This is why you have atheists today who think they are radical for rejecting the Bible that they have never read, seeing it as nothing but regime propaganda. Those who think the Bible is a tool of social control are themselves victims of propaganda, manipulation, and social control. For the word of God is anarchistic and stands as a testament to the failure of human civil government all throughout history, which we are never told to set up or seek in God’s word and are even explicitly instructed on the evils that will result from breaking with God’s decentralized social order and setting up human kings (1 Sam 8:10-18). If you can’t burn Bibles or humans, the next best step for religionists and statists is just to keep people from reading it, or if they do, to drill official interpretations and doctrines into their heads that keep them from seeing the truth on their own: that God hates statism, thinks patriotism and praise of rulers is sin, and that the greatest rebellion against Him ever by man has been to set up human kings, which God says is done “not by me” (Hos 8:4). 

The State as a tool of divine judgment

It has been popular among so-called “Christian statists” to think that States are needed to protect us from bad guys in a sinful world. The State, in their mind, acts as some sort of benign agency that exists to protect property rights and liberty. Many argue that “the State is necessary because men are sinful,” rather than to see that States are set up by sinners. But this is not the State of the Bible, which at best is a tool of God’s judgment — precisely against statists who hold that very sinful belief that “we need human civil governments to rule over us.” In the Bible, God sends the Assyrians (so to speak) upon those who sinfully trust in some other Assyrians for protection, military aid, and freedom (Isa 10). It is this sin of statism—the patriotism of Americans today who root for the men who rule over them—that gets a people occupied as a punishment for their sin of trusting in Assyrians rather than (in an anarchistic way) the Lord alone. If statists read their Bibles, or were not duped by the false pastors of the false churches, they would see that God uses States as a tool of judgment against those who turn away from His exclusive Kingship, not as some blessing for “law and order” as statists have spun it into. Ellul correctly sees the Biblical use of this institution. “The powers that be are divine scourges sent to punish the wicked” (p. 8).

Those fake Christians who advocate statism and political power as some necessary and inevitable feature of social order cannot see that we wouldn’t even be living in captivity to these men if we had obeyed God and His law in the first place. If they knew their Bibles or had humbled themselves from their idolatry for worldly rulers, they would see that state rule only comes upon people as a judgment for sin, for refusing to heed God’s law that teaches to have no other gods before Him. They would see that this political bondage we are in today is not some natural feature of earth that cannot be abolished, but that statist captivity is the result of a sin that is still in need of repentance. They would see their great fallacy in suggesting that we just live under, tolerate, and apologize for the socio-political order of the world by seeing that it is the very result of these ideas and thoughts. They would see a need to repent and amend their ways, knowing this political bondage isn’t just “the way things are.” They would begin seeking the Kingdom of God and loving their neighbors as themselves, rather than continue to partake in the sins of Babylon and believe that human rulers, whose incomes are paid through robbing our neighbors, are needed for “public safety” and social welfare. They would see that the political rulers are here because of their own idolatry as well as their own failure to keep the weightier matters as prescribed by Jesus, that these false benefactors who “serve” the public through authoritarian means are here only because they are filling the void created by our own slothfulness to serve our neighbors on our own.

The State is, at best, a tool of judgment by God against those wicked works that set up these governments and seek the kingdoms of men. This makes it entirely ironic that statists say a State is needed: the only reason it comes is for this very way of thinking. If they repented of their statism, which God punishes with all the evils that come along with these systems, there wouldn’t be a State to stand over men; they would seek God’s Kingdom and act as their own (voluntary and decentralized) “government.” God does not will for men to live under a State and nor does He set them up. To the contrary, statists set up these systems in their rebellion against God, and God “gives” them what they ask for. It is not that God wanted us to have a State that we have one, but that men have thrown away their God-given liberty and handed it over to men who exercise authority over them, rather than to ministrate their own network of private-voluntary charity based on the basic and central Christian commands of loving God and neighbor. It is not that God commands men to set up human civil government or that He approves of them, but that He allows men, in their sin, to turn away from Him and seek false kingdoms ruled by false gods. As Ellul saw,

“God wills the good, but he leaves us free to do the opposite. If he did not, if as the Almighty he made us automatically do the good, human life would no longer have any meaning. We would be robots in his hands, toys that he has made” (p. 42).

Men are free to seek the good or the evil. God is here to tell us, through His word, the consequences of either choice: We can seek His Kingdom and be blessed with abundance, peace, and freedom, or we can seek the kingdoms of men and be cursed with taxation, inflation, famines, conscription, police states, prisons, labor camps, and all the other things that should today be increasingly apparent to anyone who looks around, even if they have not yet realized the causality of these effects to man’s abandonment of God and His Law. 

Seeking the Kingdom of God

Thankfully, Jacques Ellul wasn’t merely one to complain about the problems and leave it at that. He clearly saw the other, Christian way of doing things, which doesn’t say that we are stuck living under human rulers forever and sees that they are here only because we have been unjust and forsaken our Godly responsibilities to each other to form congregations of mutual service to one another and expand a vast network of Kingdom-seeking Christians who make up the “government” of God. This idea that we are irredeemably caught in a political bondage from which we cannot escape, which in truth has only come upon us for our sin, idolatry toward men, and slothfulness to seek God’s Kingdom, has to be one of the major deceptions of a modern, escapist Christianity that turns people away from any hope for liberation from modern Egyptian systems, suggesting that those who spin it are on the payrolls of Pharaohs who wish to present their rule as inevitable and permanent. Happily, Jacques Ellul doesn’t buy into this idea that we cannot leave Egypt. 

“Christians, if they act properly and are not wicked, do not need to obey the political authorities but should organize themselves in autonomous communities on the margin of society and government” (p. 8).

This type of Kingdom-seeking action is what we are called to do — not partake in churchian rituals or sit around and wait for the world to end. We are, in the here and now, to assemble together for the express purpose of loving our neighbors as ourselves and looking after their welfare, so that they don’t have to either starve or turn to the civil fathers of this world for their daily bread. We are to be ministers in the Kingdom of God that operates a daily system of regularized aid to one another, not just people who attend some vain “worship service” on Sunday morning that has nothing to do with service at all, only to spit each other back out into the world Monday morning to serve and be served by the kingdoms of this world. We are to be acting as God’s Kingdom government on earth. The early Christians were not just a radical band of men who “worshiped” God as the people of the institutional churches do today, while being citizens of Rome otherwise. They worshiped God by serving each other in a decentralized network of charity, breaking bread together, and living as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven apart from the Roman system — “in the world but not of it.”.

The Christianity of anarchism

It is this type of Kingdom organization, where God’s people gather into congregations and networks of congregations that serve the purpose of providing for one another in every way, that effectively abolish the kingdoms of men. No violent revolution is necessary, and indeed is only likely to produce the opposite result of hindering the movement, inviting violent reactions against us, and allowing the statists to expand their power. We need not take up the sword. Besides, as Christ taught, all those who live by the sword—statists or revolutionaries—will die by the sword. To abolish the tax-based kingdoms of men that have been raised up in our failure to serve one another, we need only to begin to agitate in our communities, gather God’s Kingdom-seekers, and begin to organize with them. 

Filled with Christian ideas of overcoming evil with good (Rom 12:21), preaching the Gospel to others, and organizing our people as a means of changing people and turning the world upside down, Ellul finds it easy to adopt a non-violent anarchist approach to dealing with the political plunder society. Thus he believed in an “anarchism that acts by means of persuasion, by the creation of small groups and networks, denouncing falsehood and oppression, aiming at a true overturning of authorities of all all kinds as people at the bottom speak and organize themselves” (pp. 13-14). The role of the Christian agitator in society is to expose the lies of the world that are used to prop up the false kingdoms of men, to refute the fallacies of statism and the misconceptions of liberty, and to tear down all these worldly arguments that are raised up against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:5). As Ellul continues in this non-violent Christian strategy for social change,

“We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of the many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end. The State does not respect its own rules” (p. 16).

Christianity and the political means 

Our purpose is not to violently revolt nor to participate in politics, but to agitate our communities around us to the truths of the Lord, all while we build a Kingdom-network of assistance to bring these people into as they walk out of the world and its systems with us. We are not to adopt the violent means of the statists. Those “Christian nationalists” who think we must seize the reins of political power to build a “Christian nation” through the force of the State do not understand basic Christian principles. As Ellul says, “Faith cannot be forced. The Bible tells us that…In no way can Christian truth be imposed by violence or war” (pp. 26-27). Those who imagine some political conquest of forcing Christianity on people, which would only serve to create false confessions, have gotten things backward from that of scripture. As Ellul goes on to say, forcing people to believe is “a complete reversal of the preaching of Jesus, the epistles of Paul, and also the prophets. Faith has to come to birth as a free act, not a forced one. Otherwise it has no meaning” (p. 27).

If Christianity is opposed to forcibly making men bend to our ways, and instead relies on the use of persuasion to point others to the truth, then Christians must be anarchists as far as regards their horizontal life with other people. As Ellul saw in his appeal for Christians to see the relation between their faith and anti-statist political philosophy, “Christians who try to be faithful to the Bible will agree that anarchists are quite right to denounce such actions and practices (ie., the policy of violence, force, and war)” (p. 27). We cannot force men to receive the word of God or hear His voice and follow; they must come to it on their own or be changed by the Lord himself. God rules in the hearts and minds of His people, who, hearing the call, begin working in ways that are conducive to expanding the ways of His kingdom among their people. Along with violent revolution, Ellul thus rightly rejects electoral politics, too. “The political game can produce no important changes in our society and we must radically refuse to take part in it” (p. 14). We do not “Christianize” society by ruling over men or by voting for “Christian rulers” to force our ways upon others. There is nothing Christian about statism at all, especially if to be a Christian means to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If Jesus didn’t seek to reform Rome and vote on new rulers, why should any “Christian” think they can? As Ellul says, “In every form [Jesus] challenged [power] radically” (p. 56). Nor was He a revolutionary. “He did not use violent methods to destroy it” (p. 56). Christians are ineligible to wield political power, and all those who seek it are under satanic temptation and deception, which Jesus himself didn’t fall for (Luke 4). As Ellul points out, this temptation by the devil on the mountain shows that all political power and temptation to it is satanic. 

“All powers, all the power and glory of kingdoms, all that has to do with politics and political authority,  belongs to the devil, and has all been given to him, and he gives it to whom he will those who will hold political power, receive it from him and depend on him” (p. 58). 

Those “Christian nationalists” and regular old American conservatives who believe that our calling is to bring “Christian” influence to politics and wield the sword over people to make society more Christian are not only turning against the ways of Jesus, but are decidedly under satanic temptation to flirt with the institutions of this world. All statists are Satan-worshipers, because they seek worldly power systems that are not of the Lord. Jesus himself rejected these temptations to political power, and so must anyone who wishes to call themselves a Christian after His lead.

“Jesus rejects the devil‘s offer [of political power]. Jesus does not say to the devil: It is not true. You do not have this power of kingdoms and states. He does not dispute his claim. He refuses the offer of power because the devil demands that he should fall down before him and worship him” (p. 58).

The idea of some many “Christians” that there can be a “godly” political power—this institution that Jesus tells us in Mark 10 is a system where men exercise authority over other men rather than serve them—so long as we get “Christians” in power is a myth. The problem is political power itself, not the people who occupy it. This problem is not solved by getting “Christians” into office, as many believe. As Ellul says, 

“All national rulers, no matter what the nation or political regime, lord over their subjects. There can be no political power without tyranny. This is plain and certain for Jesus. When there are rulers and great leaders, there can be no such thing as good political power. [All] power corrupts” (pp. 61-62).

It is futile to attempt to Christianize the Babylonian empires of the world. They were never Christian to begin with, and are wholly contrary to Jesus’s call to repent and seek the Kingdom of God. The type of society that Christians are to seek—this Kingdom of God where we love our neighbors and serve them freely—does not have state rulers whatsoever. Jesus commands us to not do things as the people of the world do them, ie., to set ourselves up in positions of power and rule over other people (Mark 10:42-45). The problem for many statist-minded folk who profess to be Christians is that they not only fail to see Jesus’s command for us to be anarchists, but they also miss His tone that is not very worried about the kingdoms of this world, whether getting our people in control of them or rebelling against them and overthrowing them. As Ellul says, Jesus’s vibe is much more so one of “do not be so concerned about fighting kings. Let them be” (p. 62). We are not to be worried about the statist systems of the world, but seeking another Kingdom that exists entirely outside of it. As he went on, 

“Set up a marginal society which will not be interested in such things [as reforming worldly systems or wielding political power ourselves], in which there will be no power, authority, or hierarchy. Do not do things as they are usually done in society, which you cannot change. Create another society on another foundation” (p. 62). 

We are to be seeking a Kingdom that Jesus said is not of the world, ie., not like the Roman systems of this world that are based on force and contracts with false gods for provision. When so-called “Christians” call others to vote, campaign for office, and work through the political means, they openly ignore Jesus’s description of His own Kingdom and invent their own vision of Christian society, which to be sure has nothing to do with the real thing. 

Non-political action

The problem is that many professing Christians who do have some idea of taking dominion and seeking the Kingdom—so-called Reconstructions and regular old conservative Christians are a good example of this—think that anyone who is truly seeking to change society must be involved in worldly politics, and all that all those who don’t jump into the idolatry and sin of rooting for campaigning politicians, voting for them, or telling others to do so, are not are not taking action at all. We see this every election cycle when the statist “Christians” in America tell us non-voters that we must be “salt and light” in the political arena and that if we aren’t we are failing in our alleged “Christian” duty to vote on the most Christ-like Pharaohs.

This call for political action is not helped by the indeed pacified Christians on the other who have forsaken all earthly duties to God, such that the men who leap to the opposite extreme that we must be involved with the State are able to accuse God’s kingdom-seekers of having given up too. On the opposite side of those who foolishly think that political involvement is action towards God’s Kingdom, we have people who renege on all their duties to others. These are the people who conflate “world” with “earth,” such that they conclude that Jesus telling us that His kingdom was not of this world (a term used to refer to the Roman and Babylonian institutions of our world) apparently meant that there is nothing for us down below on earth and we shouldn’t seek His Kingdom at all. Of course, those who call for political action have a lesson to learn here too. Whereas the one camp believes they are merely waiting on heaven and otherworldly hopes, the other expects that it can be brought about through the political institutions that Jesus makes clear are not the methods of His Kingdom. Both of these positions—political participation and sitting around waiting to for the heaven—are faulty. We are to seek God’s Kingdom, albeit not through the political means. Those who conclude that a rejection of the political method of advancing God’s Kingdom means that we are drop outs are buying into a false dichotomy where one either participates in political systems, or is assumed to be doing “nothing” to make society more Godly. Ellul explains the obvious fallacy here: “As if the only mode of action were political!” (p. 15).

That we oppose the political means of the world does not mean we must resign in the fight or that we are apathetic to everything about life on earth. Indeed, our agitation and activism must be decidedly outside of political bounds. We should not be thought of as losers because we don’t believe in the political means of operating, because the Kingdom of God is not advanced by these means anyway. The action we must take is non-political, such that not engaging in statist politics should never be equated with inaction or failing to seek dominion. Seeking the Kingdom of God is “political” in the sense that it stands opposed to the kingdoms of this world, and even in some sense that we are speaking of a literal Kingdom (albeit one that doesn’t operate by exercising authority over other people). But it is not political in the colloquial sense that we must work through the States of the world to further God’s work. Indeed, any effort to Christianize society by reforming Babylonian systems is contradictory to Jesus’s message and ministry and bound to fail for these reasons. The Kingdom of God is necessarily sought outside of, and apart from, these systems, such that our avoidance of political participation should never receive the charge that we are giving up and don’t believe in doing anything about the world around us.

This tendency by men to conflate action and politics, such that they can accuse anyone who rejects the political means of progress as resigning in the fight altogether, is not just a mistaken conflation but also inherently contradictory as far as the Kingdom of God goes. Political participation is not “action” at all, since this is not a legitimate means in which to advance God’s Kingdom. And action is not political, since the means men must use to advance this Kingdom of God must be outside of worldly power structures. Not only are the people wrong who say that we are resigning in the fight for God’s free society because we are not taking part in their worldly politics, but they are also themselves hypocrites who have adopted means that will not even lead to the ends which they allege to seek, and what is more, will only work to advance the kingdoms of men. Statists are enemies of God and can never be said to be working on His Kingdom. 

Under this conflation of action and politics then, where it is wrongly assumed there is no action but political action (eg., voting and running for office), everyone who doesn’t work toward the ungodly end of raising up supposedly “Christian” politicians is thought to be choosing isolation and inaction. They conclude that we don’t care about society at all, because we don’t care about working with the Egyptians to change things. Ellul explains the problem. Avoiding the political means “is not desocialization. Jesus is not advising us to leave society and go into the desert. His counsel is that we should stay in society and set up in communities which obey other rules and other laws” (p. 62). 

Again, another problem with this view has been that many Christians have taken this opposite extreme and assumed that to not be of “the world” meant to have nothing to do with earthly existence and the Kingdom of God whatever. They have hidden out in monasteries in the mountains, practiced vain rituals that had nothing to do with feeding their neighbors and caring for the poor, hunkered down in the pews for singalongs and sermons, and sought an otherworldly and heavenly glory only where they are “saved” in the afterlife after a hellish and statist time on an earth that they thought to be cursed. They have resigned in the fight so much that others have been able to react by saying that we must be politically engaged with Roman systems if we care. Again, both these positions are mistaken. We are not to use the political means nor neglect to seek God’s Kingdom; we are to seek God’s Kingdom without the use of political power. Power and Christ’s Kingdom are mutually exclusive — so are politics and godly action. 

The impossibility of anarchism? 

Soon into the book, Anarchy and Christianity takes an interesting, and seemingly self-defeating, turn toward doubting the realization of a stateless society where men live freely under God rather than as slaves under human government. Ellul confusingly says that he doesn’t actually believe that anarchism is a possibility. For him it is more so just a principled position that one should take and hold, without much hope of it going anywhere. He says, “I believe that the anarchist fight, the struggle for an anarchist society, is essential, but I also think that the realization of such a society is impossible” (p. 19). And, “As I see it, an ideal anarchist society can never be achieved” (p. 20).

His argument against the realization of stateless is an assumption that people are inherently and irredeemably covetous and lustful for power. An anarchist response to this could be that this would not be possible on any sort of mass, society-wide scale if the political mechanism for plundering others were taken away and these men would be left without a means of carrying out their desires and forcing them onto others. But Ellul seems to apply this idea that “people are not good” to all men. He essentially concedes the main argument of statists and posits that people are not good enough for freedom. “If we give people complete freedom to choose, they will inevitably seek to dominate someone or something and they will inevitably covet what belongs to others” (p. 20).

A Christian response to this idea that men aren’t good enough for freedom is simply to point to the Biblical idea that men can repent, be made new, and born again in Christ and be redeemed. Scripture says that God made men upright, not inherently wicked and covetous, and that only through their unrepentant sin have they sought many inventions (ie., bought into the covetousness of socialists). There is a clear distinction in scripture of the wicked (eg., those who control governments) and the non-wicked (eg., those who seek God’s Kingdom and shun these institutions), notwithstanding the many who use the “we’re all sinners” idea to suggest that we can never repent and make it anywhere. God’s word has not come to us to merely criticize us all as failures and tell us that there’s no earthly hope for men to seek and attain the Kingdom of God. It tells us, in fact, that the son of God has come to restore men to their original purpose of the Dominion Mandate — that Jesus has died for our sins so that we may repent and enter into the jurisdiction of His Kingdom. 

It seems completely off base then to place everyone in the camp of a wannabe statist who is just awaiting their opportunity to strike and rob their neighbors. The Bible speaks not of irredeemable men who are forever lost in the ways of the world, but of men who can repent and come to the truth when they seek it. It tells us to walk away from the wicked path and seek the righteous path, to learn to righteously discern the good from the evil and no longer call evil good. Would God tell us these things if He didn’t mean for us to hear His words and do them? “Do not set foot on the path of the wicked or walk in the way of evildoers. Avoid it; do not travel on it. Turn from it and pass on by” (Proverbs 4:14-15). Does God not tell us that blessings await those who do not walk in the path with sinners (Prov 1:1)? Does God not make a distinction between people who do evil and those who wish to keep the commandments of God (Psa 119:115)? Does scripture not say that the devil will flee those who resist him (James 4:7)? Does it not tell us to come out from among the people, be separate, and touch no unclean things (2 Cor 6:17)? To turn away from iniquity (2 Tim 2:19)? To turn from evil and do good, and to seek peace and pursue it (1 Peter 3:11)? To purify ourselves (Isa 52:11)? To not yield to sinners (Prov 1:11)? To avoid the kingdoms of this world and do as God has told us instead (Josh 23:6-8)?

There is a case, I guess, that could be made for doing good even if it didn’t result in anything or work to make society more godly and free. Ellul at least advocates this, as opposed to the millions of defeatists in Christianity who either don’t even hold anarchist principles or aren’t minded at all in efforts to organize, thinking it to be futile in their heavenly-mindedness. He says, “I don’t think we can truly prevent [power]. But we can struggle against it. We can organize on the fringe” (p. 23). But why should we believe this? Why should we believe we have a moral and godly obligation to do good, yet that the providential law has it where it won’t result in as much? Ellul seems to take the position, as held by some secular libertarian anarchists, that the State is unnecessary but inevitable (Holcombe, 2004). It is hard to think this should be the position of the Christian, who should altogether have a different hope than the anarchist who remains confined to worldly ways of thinking and doesn’t live by the hope that the Kingdom of God is “at hand” as Jesus said it was. Even from a purely cause and effect understanding of social order, this sort of assumption of the inevitability of the State is a confusing one. Why would God give us principles that, however sound and worthy of holding, ultimately couldn’t attain the ends sought at? Why even hold these principles unless we believed the ends were attainable? That our Kingdom-seeking will produce results?

For these reasons, Anarchy and Christianity tends to read more as the musings of an academic interested in the intersections of anarchism and Christianity out of intellectual curiosity than it does the writings of one who truly believes in the Christian abolitionist cause and the success and victory of the Gospel message. Though not completely, Ellul seems to lack the radical abolitionist spirit that trusts that the Lord will truly be with those who seek His Kingdom — that we need only to seek it and all other things will be added unto us. It lacks a spirit-filled belief that the Kingdom of God is near to us and that we need only to repent and begin to seek it together. It lacks the great hopes in the scriptures that the worldly rulers, powers, and authorities will eventually be abolished (1 Cor 15:24). 

He seems to be unnecessarily worried about power vacuums and the inability of men to manage in a free society, despite scripture calling men to repentance, righteousness, and the good, which we must assume means that this path is possible, otherwise God tells us to do it in vain. “Seek the good, although you won’t find it” just isn’t the nature of scripture. A more scriptural sentiment is to seek the good and you will find it. As Jesus says Himself,

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).

There is no reason to think that if we sought the Kingdom of God, ie., if we began rallying God’s people and organizing them into godly networks where they served their neighbors freely and effectively abolished the State, that good things would not await us and that we would be left without our needs being met. “Those who seek the LORD lack no good thing” (Psalm 34:10). Many other verses freely suggest that seeking the Lord will be met with blessings (Psa 37:4, 50:15, 91:15; Mark 11:24; John 15:17; 1 John 5:14). Perhaps Ellul is lacking faith in the Lord and enough diligence in seeking the Kingdom of God when he suggests that a society without statist oppressors is impossible? As scripture says, “Anyone who approaches Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him” (Hebrews 11:6).

Anarchism without God

If there is an anarchism that is impossible, however, it is anarchism without God. Here we might begin to qualify “anarchism” a little further. Strictly speaking, men do not escape rulers, gods, law, religion, or theocracy at all. These are inescapable concepts. The real question is who do you want to rule you? Who shall be your god? Whose law do you wish to live under? The only choice is God or men. This is important because there is no such thing as godless anarchism, just as there is no such thing as godly statism. All statism is ungodly, and all ungodliness results in statism. Men cannot achieve statelessness unless they know the Lord as their King, and all those who reject the Lord as their King will find themselves living under a State. We must submit that there is really no such thing as anarchism without God, or put another way, that the only “anarchism” is Godarchism, where God is our Ruler. Those who will not be ruled by God will be ruled by men, which is to say that those who reject God’s rulership will live under tyranny. This is not merely a theoretical picture of things either. We are never just seeking to follow some principles down one path or the other. We are also seeking the blessings of God, who grants liberty to those who are seeking His ways.

For this reason, the old “anarchist” mantra of “No God, No master” is not even an anarchist position at all. Those who don’t have God as their King will have men as their masters. Yet this type of godless anarchism, which we are arguing here to be impossible, is the dominant conception of anarchism by most who adhere to this political philosophy. They believe they can choose neither and go with the myth of autonomy instead. “How about I not be ruled by men or God?” is a popular comeback to these assertions here. They have made a grave error however in tossing out the idea of having a heavenly King in the Lord in their rightful rejection of earthly masters — something the hypocritical “statist Christians” can’t see as they attempt to defend two masters and two kingdoms, although the Lord said we can only serve one.

Ellul’s reply to the anarchists who say “No God, No Master,” under this sort of built-in assumption that God is some tyrant who arbitrarily wrecks people in the same way that state rulers do, is that they have wrongly misunderstood the essence of God’s nature, which, however cliché it might sound, is that God is actually love (pp. 32-35). He then reformulates what this slogan might actually mean, concluding that “I do not believe anarchists would be too happy with a formula that runs: ‘No love, no master’” (p. 35). 

Anarchist order in the Bible?

Whether or not the people in the Bible did one thing or another is not always entirely related to what God wanted us to know about His will. Even if there was not a Biblical example of a purely anarchist society, we should still see that the scripture is mostly a narrative of men who rebel against God’s will. The stories we get are most often God telling people to do things one way, ie., have no other gods before Him, and the people doing the opposite. However, the pre-monarchy period in the Book of Judges provides a good picture of the decentralized society. Law was under the Mosaic tradition and enforced by judges, there was no standing army (forces were assembled ad hoc as needed), there was no great bureaucracy to administer the affairs of a government, no central state apparatus or monopoly on force, no coercive taxation that funded this arrangement, nor any sort of kings and human “sovereigns.” These “judges” in this society (Gideon, Samson) were raised up for things like dispute resolution, fighting enemies, and upholding justice. They were not like rulers of a State, who tax people to take a monopoly on justice and then turn around and pervert justice and turn “law” into the decrees of men. It wasn’t until the kings (Saul, David) came that armies would be raised up, people would begin to be counted on censuses, and authority would be more centralized away from this sort of decentralized, theocratic confederacy that preceded it.

We needn’t try and make the case that the period of judges was some idealized or even ideological anarchist society as we know it or want it to be. The point is that it was greatly decentralized compared to the period that would follow and lacked most all of the central features of a statist society as we know it today. This period is important in the timeline of things as it relates to political theology. God had not yet considered these people to have turned away from Him, because they had not yet sought kings and centralized state bureaucracies and armies to manage their affairs for them. After this sort of quasi-anarchist period, where men lived freely under God’s law, we get a more clear picture of where statism began, where the centralization of power with a figurehead was launched among God’s people who were decidedly turning away from Him by turning away from this decentralized order without rulers. Ellul runs through this period of “judges” to show how this was much closer to being anarchistic society than what was to follow (pp. 45-48). He marks this post-judges period as being the beginning of statism for these people. It was here where “the real history of royal power would begin,” which was explicitly shown to be a departure from holding the Lord as King. And just as Samuel warned, he shows how all of these kings, even the supposedly “good” ones, failed to do good once in power — affirming Acton’s famous quote that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He says, “Solomon was just and upright. But then power went to his head, as it did with others. He imposed crushing taxes, built ruinous palaces, and took 700 wives and 300 concubines. He began to worship other gods besides the God Israel. He built fortresses over the whole land. When he died he was hated by everyone” (p. 49).

It is nonsensical for statists to point to the period of kings as supposed proof that God approves of these kings and wanted us to live under monarchies, not only because these kings were only there in the first place because of man’s rebellion against God, but also because their track-record was far from clean. In Israel, the Northern Kingdom, the tally for kings who are reported to have done good in the sight of the Lord was zero; the kings of Judah did not fare much better. Besides, it all ended up in the people going into captivity to Assyrians and Babylonians! This exile is the proof that nothing was going right here, and that kings don’t actually prevent men from becoming captives. The Book of Kings is not a book that one should rely on to justify kings, but a testament against these human regimes. Those statists who say, “But what about king David?,” in their attempt to justify human kings (who God said were originally set up in rebellion to Him anyway) ignore how scripture describes the ultimate activities of these kings of Israel and Judah. Ellul points out “how severe the Bible is even on the ‘great’ kings…precisely to the degree that these kings represented in their day the equivalent of a State: an army, a treasury, an administration, centralization, etc” (p. 50). 

Conclusion 

I cannot report that the book is very inspiring and could lead one to action in seeking the Kingdom of God, or even that it is a thorough primer on Christian anarchism that one should take up if they really wanted to know what this political-theological position was all about. It is unlikely to create any convinced Christian anarchists who fully see God’s hatred for statism and idolatry, which is unmistakable if one were to read a Bible instead. Though he says up front that proselytizing is not his goal, at any rate I don’t think a book of this sort would have much effect on anarchists who reject Christianity or professing Christians who idolize the State.

One would not miss much if they passed on it, though it is short, easy to read, and not scholarly or academic or anything like that. It is more so just boring, with a handful of curious positions and turns within it. There are hardly anything which we might call great quotes to be extracted from it and remembered, and which could be used to help further a movement. If one is interested in some tidbits of the spiritual-intellectual journey of a Frenchman who navigated the terrain amidst anarchists and Christians who were hostile to each other’s ideas, then Anarchy and Christianity may be of interest. If one is looking for a fiery read that motivates them to seek God’s Kingdom on the full faith that there is something worth seeking, they might want to pass.