I am a radical Christian and I am an anarchist.

As a radical Christian, I believe that the living God of the Old Testament is dead. That God died in Jesus. I believe in the ultimacy and finality of death, knowing the full reality of the Fall and humanity’s expulsion from paradise. This punctuates my faith and belief system. Religion tries to go back to the Edenic reality, and when it does this it tries to avoid the full reality of the Fall and seeks a prefallen condition. Whether it is grounded in tradition or a call to a time past, this is unacceptable to me. My faith revolves around a mutable divinity that unveils itself in history, the radical Christian Thomas Muntzer called it revelation, and Thomas Altizer calls it apocalypse. The future I believe in, is a future where God is all in all. Right now what is all in all is nothingness and pure evil. This evil is the product of a society that built on the backs of the oppressed.

So off to “No Gods, No Masters”.

In a way, I believe in a type of divinity. This divinity is the actual process of history, of transcendence becoming immanence, Spirit becoming flesh, Alpha and Omega. So in some sense I do believe in God. But the King of Kings here is not a God of Judgment, but is instead a Liberator and Redeemer. Bakunin once said that if God existed that he’s have to be abolished, I say that the only God is the God present in human history and freedom. In some ways I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in a God in the sky or any sort of afterlife. The Kingdom of God is a state of being. ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ I think this idea is fundamentally anti-religious. It suggests that the Kingdom of God is something you do and I think opposing religion* is part of that. I think our faiths are called to be more than trinket spirituality and a quest for the beginning. When I envision the God that religion seems to envision, I envision the most totalitarian being in existence. If your god demands tribute or worship it’s a god that needs to be abolished, so “Ni dieu ni maître!”(neither god or master) if your god stands in the way of a libertarian spirituality.

*I clearly don’t have a problem with communal spirituality and I think it’s obvious that I use religion in a specific manner. Religion is a complex phenomena and I don’t actually think the concept of religion is necessarily against anarchism.