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Title: Anarchism and Religion
Author: Nicolas Walter
Date: 1991
Language: en
Topics: atheist, religion
Source: Retrieved on 1 January 1999 from http://www.tao.ca/~freedom/walter.html

Nicolas Walter

Anarchism and Religion

For the present purpose, anarchism is defined as the political and

social ideology which argues that human groups can and should exist

without instituted authority, and especially as the historical anarchist

movement of the past two hundred years; and religion is defined as the

belief in the existence and significance of supernatural being(s), and

especially as the prevailing Judaeo-Christian system of the past two

thousand years. My subject is the question: Is there a necessary

connection between the two and, if so, what is it? The possible answers

are as follows: there may be no connection, if beliefs about human

society and the nature of the universe are quite independent; there may

be a connection, if such beliefs are interdependent; and, if there is a

connection, it may be either positive, if anarchism and religion

reinforce each other, or negative, if anarchism and religion contradict

each other.

The general assumption is that there is a negative connection logical,

because divine and human authority reflect each other; and

psychological, because the rejection of human and divine authority, of

political and religious orthodoxy, reflect each other. Thus the French

Encyclopdie Anarchiste (1932) included an article on Atheism by Gustave

Brocher: ‘An anarchist, who wants no all-powerful master on earth, no

authoritarian government, must necessarily reject the idea of an

omnipotent power to whom everything must be subjected; if he is

consistent, he must declare himself an atheist.’ And the centenary issue

of the British anarchist paper Freedom (October 1986) contained an

article by Barbara Smoker (president of the National Secular Society)

entitled ‘Anarchism implies Atheism’. As a matter of historical fact the

negative connection has indeed been the norm anarchists are generally

non-religious and are frequently anti-religious, and the standard

anarchist slogan is the phrase coined by the (non-anarchist) socialist

Auguste Blanqui in 1880: ‘Ni dieu ni matre!’ (Neither God nor master!).

But the full answer is not so simple.

Thus it is reasonable to argue that there is no necessary connection.

Beliefs about the nature of the universe, of life on this planet, of

this species, of purpose and values and morality, and so on, may be

independent of beliefs about the desirability and possibility of liberty

in human society. It is quite possible to believe at the same time that

there is a spiritual authority and that there should not be a political

authority. But it is also reasonable to argue that there is a necessary

connection, whether positive or negative.

The argument for a positive connection is that religion has libertarian

effects, even if established Churches seldom do. Religion may check

politics, the Church may balance the State, divine sanction may protect

oppressed people. In Classical Greece, Antigone (in the Oedipus myth)

appeals to divine law in her individual rebellion against the human law

of the ruler Creon. [1] Socrates (the greatest figure in Greek thought)

appealed to the divine demon within him to inspire his individual

judgement. Zeno (the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy) appealed

to a higher authority than the State. Within Judaism, the Prophets of

the Old Testament challenged Kings and proclaimed what is known as the

‘Social Gospel’. One of the most eloquent texts in the Bible is Hannah’s

song when she conceives Samuel, which is echoed by Mary’s song when she

conceives Jesus the Magnificat:

My soul doth magnify the Lord; and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my

saviour... He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the

proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty

from their seats; and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled

the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Within Christianity, Jesus came for the poor and weak, and the early

Christians resisted the Roman State. When Christianity became the

established ideology in its turn, religious heretics challenged both

Church and State. Medieval heresies helped to destroy the old system the

Albigensians and the Waldensians, the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit and

the Taborites in Bohemia, the Anabaptists in Germany and Switzerland.

This pattern may be seen in Britain. John Ball, the ideologist of the

Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, was a priest who proclaimed in a sermon to the

rebels: ‘Things shall not go right until there is neither master nor

slave.’ Later religious dissent led to political dissent, and the

extreme Puritans in the English Revolution of 1649–1659 were the

pioneers of the native tradition of anarchism. Gerrard Winstanley, the

ideologist of the Diggers or True Levellers, who came nearer to

anarchism than anyone before the French Revolution, moved within a few

years from quoting the Bible to invoking ‘the great Creator Reason’. The

tradition was continued by the Ranters and Seekers, the Quakers and

Shakers, and later the Universalists and Unitarians, and may be seen in

the modern peace movement.

The argument for a negative connection is that religion supports

politics, the Church supports the State, opponents of political

authority also oppose religious authority. In Classical Greece and Rome,

the religious sceptics Protagoras, Diogenes, Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus

Empiricus were the real liberators (and the same is true in Ancient

India and China). Within Judaism, God is the archetypical figure of

(male) authority, the Jewish State was a theocracy ruled by priests, and

the few good Prophets (and the good Rabbis who followed them) should be

seen as dissenters. In Christianity, Paul told his followers that ‘the

powers that be are ordained of God’, Church and State stand together as

the ‘two swords’ of the Gospel of Luke, and the good Christians have

been rebels against ecclesiastical as much as secular power the heretics

and sceptics, esprits forts and libertins, the freethinkers and

philosophes, Jean Meslier and Denis Diderot (who both wanted to see ‘the

last king strangled in the guts of the last priest’) and Voltaire (whose

motto was ‘Ecrasez l’infeme!’), Thomas Paine (the pioneer of freethought

and also of free society, the opponent of Priestcraft as well as

Kingcraft) and Richard Carlile (who led the shift towards both atheism

and anarchism), and so on to the historical freethought movement.

Within the historical anarchist movement, these two attitudes exist

together. Revolutionary anarchism, like revolutionary socialism, has

quasi-religious features expressed in irrationalism, utopianism,

millennialism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, and so on. But

anarchism, like socialism and liberalism, also has anti-religious

features all of them modern political ideologies tending to assume the

rejection of all orthodox belief and authority and is the supreme

example of dissent, disbelief, and disobedience. All progressive

thought, culminating in humanism, depends on the assumption that every

single human being has the right to think for himself or herself; and

all progressive politics, culminating in anarchism, depends on the

assumption that every single human being has the right to act for

himself or herself. (A point worth mentioning is the connection of

anarchism, as of liberalism and socialism, with the alternative religion

of Freemasonry, to which several leading anarchists have belonged

Proudhon, Bakunin, Louise Michel, Ferrer, Volin, and so on.) There is no

doubt that the prevailing strain within the anarchist tradition is

opposition to religion. William Godwin, the author of the Enquiry

Concerning Political Justice (1793), the first systematic text of

libertarian politics, was a Calvinist minister who began by rejecting

Christianity, and passed through deism to atheism and then what was

later called agnosticism. Max Stirner, the author of The Individual and

His Property (1845), the most extreme text of libertarian politics,

began as a left-Hegelian, post-Feuerbachian atheist, rejecting the

‘spooks’ of religion as well as of politics including the spook of

‘humanity’. Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist, who

was well known for saying, ‘Property is theft’, also said, ‘God is evil’

and ‘God is the eternal X’. Bakunin, the main founder of the anarchist

movement, attacked the Church as much as the State, and wrote an essay

which his followers later published as God and the State (1882), in

which he inverted Voltaire’s famous saying and proclaimed: ‘If God

really existed, he would have to be abolished.’ Kropotkin, the

best-known anarchist writer, was a child of the Enlightenment and the

Scientific Revolution, and assumed that religion would be replaced by

science and that the Church as well as the State would be abolished; he

was particularly concerned with the development of a secular system of

ethics which replaced supernatural theology with natural biology. Errico

Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero, the main founders of the Italian anarchist

movement, both came from freethinking families (and Cafiero was involved

with the National Secular Society when he visited London during the

1870s). Eliseé and Elie Reclus, the best-loved French anarchists, were

the sons of a Calvinist minister, and began by rejecting religion before

they moved on to anarchism. Sebastien Faure, the most active speaker and

writer in the French movement for half a century, was intended for the

Church and began by rejecting Catholicism and passing through

anti-clericalism and socialism on the way to anarchism. Andre Lorulot, a

leading French individualist before the First World War, was then a

leading freethinker for half a century. Johann Most, the best-known

German anarchist for a quarter of a century, who wrote ferocious

pamphlets on the need for violence to destroy existing society, also

wrote a ferocious pamphlet on the need to destroy supernatural religion

called The God Plague (1883). Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), the

great Dutch writer, was a leading atheist as well as anarchist.

Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, the best-known Dutch anarchist, was a

Calvinist minister who began by rejecting religion before passing

through socialism on the way to anarchism. Anton Constandse was a

leading Dutch anarchist and freethinker. Emma Goldman and Alexander

Berkman, the best-known Jewish American anarchists, began by rejecting

Judaism and passing through populism on the way to anarchism. Rudolf

Rocker, the German leader of the Jewish anarchists in Britain, was

another child of the Enlightenment and spoke and wrote on secular as

much as political subjects. In Spain, the largest anarchist movement in

the world, which has often been described as a quasi-religious

phenomenon, was in fact profoundly naturalistic and secularist and

anti-Christian as well as anti-clerical. Francisco Ferrer, the

well-known Spanish anarchist who was judicially murdered in 1909, was

best known for founding the Modern School which tried to give secular

education in a Catholic country. The leaders of the anarchist movements

in Latin America almost all began by rebelling against the Church before

rebelling against the State. The founders of the anarchist movements in

India and China all had to begin by discarding the traditional religions

of their communities. In the United States, Voltairine de Cleyre was (as

her name suggests) the child of freethinkers, and wrote and spoke on

secular as much as political topics. The two best-known American

anarchists today (both of Jewish origin) are Murray Bookchin, who calls

himself an ecological humanist, and Noam Chomsky, who calls himself a

scientific rationalist. Two leading figures of a younger generation,

Fred Woodworth and Chaz Bufe, are militant atheists as well as

anarchists. And so on.

This pattern prevails in Britain. Not only William Godwin but nearly all

libertarians have been opposed to orthodox religion as well as orthodox

politics William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Wilson, Joseph Lane,

Henry Seymour (who was active in the National Secular Society before he

helped to found the British anarchist movement), James Tochatti (who was

active in the British Secular Union before he turned to socialism and

anarchism), Alfred Marsh (the son of the son-in-law of G. J. Holyoake,

who founded the secularist movement), Guy Aldred (who rapidly moved from

evangelical Christianity through secularism and socialism to

anarcho-syndicalism), A. S. Neill (whose educational work was opposed to

religious and ethical orthodoxy as much as to political and social

orthodoxy), and so on. And of course Shelley is the poet laureate of

atheists and anarchists alike.

There have been few serious studies of anarchist psychology, but those

that do exist agree that the first step on the way to anarchism is

frequently the rejection of religion. Nevertheless, there are plenty of

exceptions to this rule. In Britain, for example, Edward Carpenter was a

mystic, Herbert Read saw anarchism as a religious philosophy, Alex

Comfort moved from scientific to quasi-religious humanism, Colin

MacInnes saw anarchism as a kind of religion; in the United States, Paul

Goodman rejected Judaism but retained some kind of religion, and New Age

nonsense has infected anarchists as well as so many other radicals. But

the great exception is the phenomenon of Christian anarchism and

religious anarcho-pacifism. Above all, Leo Tolstoy, who rejected all

orthodoxies of both religion and politics, exerted a powerful double

pressure towards anarchism “although he always repudiated the anarchist

movement and towards religion by pushing Christians towards his

idiosyncratic version of anarchism as much as he pushed anarchists

towards his idiosyncratic version of Christianity. He influenced the

Western peace movement (including such figures as Bart de Ligt and

Aldous Huxley, Danilo Dolci and Ronald Sampson), and also movements in

the Third World (especially India, including such figures as M. K.

Gandhi and J. P. Narayan). A similar development in the United States is

the Catholic Worker movement (including such figures as Dorothy Day and

Ammon Hennacy).

So the conclusion is that there is indeed a strong correlation between

anarchism and atheism, but that it is not complete, and it is not

necessary. Most anarchists are non-religious or anti-religious and most

take their atheism for granted but some anarchists are religious. There

are therefore several valid libertarian views of religion. Perhaps the

most persuasive and productive one was that expressed by Karl Marx

(before he became a ‘Marxist’) in the famous passage from his essay

Towards the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844):

Religious distress is at the same time an expression of real distress

and a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the

oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a

soulless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of

religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their

real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their

condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the

vale of tears whose halo is religion.

The true anarchist attitude to religion is surely to attack not faith or

the Church so much as what it is in so many people that needs faith and

the Church, just as the truly anarchist attitude to politics is surely

to attack not obedience or the State so much as what it is in most

people that needs obedience and the State the will to believe and the

will to obey. And the last anarchist hope about both religion and

politics is that, just as the Church once seemed necessary to human

existence but is now withering away, so the State still seems necessary

to human existence but will also wither away, until both institutions

finally disappear. We may yet end with Neither God nor master!

Based on a talk given at the South Place Ethical Society on 14 July

1991.

[1] In Sophocles’ play Antigone (c. 440BC), Creon actually says in

response to her rebellion, ‘There is no greater evil than anarchy’ one

of the earliest uses of the word in the pejorative double sense.