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Properly understood, the Church functions as a community that:
- Embodies an alternative ethics of nonviolence and transformation, rather than violence and destruction. We overcome evil through good. (Matthew 5.38ff; Luke 6.27ff; Romans 12.14ff)
- Embodies an alternative identity and allegiance in a Kingdom that is not of this world but is present in it. We act as witness to and dissident from Empire and Nation-State. (John 18.36; Luke 17.20f)
- Embodies an alternative economics of generosity rather than greed, of Jubilee rather than exploitation. We give freely and forgive debts as ours have been forgiven. (Matthew 6.19; Luke 4.19; Acts 2.44ff)
Each of these aspects of the Kingdom of Heaven, to which the Church is witness, requires hard commitment and flies in the face of “conventional wisdom” and cultural norms (especially in America). Christianity in this form becomes, ironically, more difficult to live out in societies where Christian rhetoric and nominal institutional membership are normative — i.e., in large countries with a “Judeo-Christian Tradition” or societies where the majority of citizens attend church. This paradox arises because in these situations Christian religion is appropriated by the State, compromising its essential pacifism (and, in individualist-capitalist societies, often its economic/social aspects as well).
Thus for the Christian who aspires to restore the Church to a model like that advocated here, “separation of church and state” is central — not to protect government from undue religious influence, but to allow the Church to maintian its integrity as a witness to the dominant order.
On December 20th, 2008, I turned eighteen. United States law demands that every male between 18 and 25 register for the Selective Service (aka the draft). This was my ‘civic duty’.
I am a pacifist.
I believe that participation in war is essentially incompatible with an attempt to emulate the example of Jesus Christ. Jesus says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and ‘Love your enemies’ and ‘Turn the other cheek’. He lived this out in radical subservience (but not obedience) to ‘authority’, spreading a message that ultimately undermines temporal power; for, to quote N. T. Wright, if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not. And Jesus, a King who knows no borders, rules over a Kingdom that exists most fully at the margins of empire
Thus I am a pacifist.
Many will say that nonviolence is not ‘practical’, not ‘realistic’. But the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from his grave after a death by crucifixion was not practical, not realistic. My hope, my life, is in that resurrection. Christ’s resurrection renders the impossible, possible; the fantastic, realistic; the idealistic, pragmatic.
My faith in nonviolence is not a blind one. It is shared by people of many faiths (such as Ghandi), and backed by scholars who ground it in non-religious research (such as Gene Sharp). Nonviolence is increasingly gaining credibility as an alternative to warfare, killing, and destruction.
Thus, I am a pacifist.
So my obligation to register with the Selective Service proved to be a moral quandary. I cannot kill. But I was required to enroll in a system that could ask me to. So I did some research, and stumbled across the Center on Conscience and War. There I learned that though there is no way to register with the Service as a conscientious objector, many young men do choose to write in their opposition to war on their registration cards.
As I prayed and thought about this process further, I remembered the words of the prophet Micah: ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not rise up against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Micah 4.3-4). The Selective Service registration card is a sword. But I could feel God’s guidance, that when my time came to fill in that card, to wield that sword, I could beat it into a plowshare.
So yesterday I went to the Post Office. I asked for a card, and took it home. I filled it out. But in a blank space, I wrote: ‘I am a conscientious objector to war because of my faith’. In another blank space: ‘Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.’ On the back: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God’, and ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares’. I prayed and mailed it.
Merely symbolic? Perhaps. Meaningless? No.
I hope the empire likes plowshares.
[this article also appeared on CrossLeft]
For some time, I have considered using the word ‘transarchy’ to describe my political philosophy: not anarchic properly speaking, but nonetheless quite anti-statist (though not necessarily anti-governmental). What follows is a document I drew up a while back that describes my ideology from a certain angle. But here’s a key disclaimer: it must absolutely be taken alongside what is said on the views page on this site. This post and that page are very different approaches to describing my attitudes towards government and society. But I don’t see them as contradictory — just as paradoxical, existing in tension with each other. Also, these different approaches represent the fact that in my own mind, many things are still being resolved, and many of my political tendencies do exist in a sort of tension.
Finally, it should be noted that what is described below is an ideal. It is something I aspire to, but something I can’t live up to particularly well. However, there are some groups, such as the Catholic Worker movement, the Amish, and intentional communities like the Simple Way, that embody exactly what I describe here.
PREAMBLE.
We the Transarchists embody an alternative to the structures of the State. Transarchy does not oppose them; rather, it outdoes them, providing an alternative identity to that of the cult of the State. Transarchy does not require withdrawal, nor the overthrow of the top-down structures of this mad world; transarchy is lived out in love rather than built up by force, and its alternative structure emerges naturally, bottom-up in the very midst of the nations.
ARTICLE I.
1. We reject violence, force, and war.
2. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” it is said, and peacemakers we will be.
3. To live transarchally, we embrace nonviolence, inherently subversive of the militarism of states.
4. Every act of peace is a pebble thrown into a pond – a pond filled with the polluted waters of hate, war, and violence. We shall throw pebbles into the pond until they pile towards the sky; the water shall drain away beneath; peace shall emerge.
ARTICLE II.
1. We reject the greed and the selfishness of extreme individualism.
2. We refuse to deprive others for our own gain. For some this entails a rejection of exploitative capitalism. For others it is merely a new practice of sharing without expectation of reward.
3. For this, some will call us communist; but ‘communist’ is derogative only because of those who forced it on others. We force it on no one. We live it.
4. However they occur, these new mutations of the ideal of loving community shall be turned towards the elimination of poverty and of suffering, in scales small and thus ultimately large.
ARTICLE III.
1. We reject the identity the State supplies us.
2. We are indifferent to its workings and its trappings, neither fighting against them nor obliging ourselves to accept them – we are subservient but not obedient.
3. We do not see citizens and noncitizens; we see only men, women, and children. We do not see persons domestic and foreign; we see only friends, neighbors, and good Samaritans.
4. We flee the cult of the State, forging instead post-national communities bound by common humanity.
THE ANTI-BILL-OF-RIGHTS
We the Transarchists are not concerned with what our rights are. We are concerned only with love, for from love emerge bonds that render rights meaningless. To love is transarchy.
No war, no greed, no State-worship; only love.
