George Walford

Through Religion to Anarchism

Although it would be going too far to say that all anarchists oppose all forms
of religion, we can safely say that nearly all of them would like to do away
with the authoritarian versions.Are they justified? Certainly this form of
religion has done a great deal of harm, but after taking full account of this we
have to add, for a complete picture, that it helped in the emergence of the
anarchist movement. It did not set out to do this but it did do it. And, in
spite of itself, it is still helping people to become anarchists.
Religion has been with us for many thousands of years, and for most of that
period many of the sharpest minds have worked on it. It comes in many different
varieties, providing more than enough material for a lifetime's study; nobody
can explain it, or account for it, or pronounce any sensible judgement upon it,
in one short article. I shall be trying to do just one thing: to show that
authoritarian religion helps with the first step towards anarchism.
This word `religion' covers a wide range of doctrines and practices. Zen
Buddhism has a good deal in common with some versions of anarchism, and a group
calling themselves Christian atheist anarchists also claim to be religious.
Without taking up the question whether such activities have a good claim to the
title or not, I leave them aside. Here `religion' carries its ordinary everyday
meaning, it indicates the orthodox doctrines of Christianity, Judaism, Islam,
Hinduism and Buddhism and the organisations promoting them. These (and perhaps
one or two more like them) are the great religions. They provide the main weight
of religious activity and each of them (except the last) presents a great god, a
tremendous, dominating figure, all-powerful, all-knowing. Creator, Lord, master
of earth and heaven, disposing not merely of life and death but of eternal life
and death.
Buddhism forms an exception, a religion without a god. We in the West sometimes
think of it as quite different from the others, but in fact it's not all that
special. Like them it presents a dominating hero-figure. It calls him Lord, it
offers him prayer and sacrifice, it studies his words and worships his holy
relics. It regards him as to some extent a saviour; Buddha delayed his own entry
into Nirvana in order to spread his message for the sake of others. About the
only thing Buddhism doesn't do is to credit him with having created the world.
Although Buddha may not be technically divine he's a lot more than human, and
Buddhism urges us to follow him on the Noble Eightfold Path
Each of the great religions, Buddhism like the others, offers a figure greater
than ourselves. It sets him on one side, the world, the flesh and the devil on
the other, and demands that we choose between them.
Having undertaken to show that religion helps with the first step towards
anarchism, I am saying that it brings people to believe in personal leaders,
something anarchism strongly opposes. But those who come to believe in a
personal leader do thereby take the first step towards anarchism. This is so
because we all begin life in a condition even farther from anarchism than that.
As children and young people we have our interests centred on individual people
and personal affairs, taking no interest in wider issues, accepting the society
around us in the same unquestioning way as we accept air and gravitation. We
live totally merged in the state, submitting to it without question, not even
knowing that we are doing so. Thatis the farthest from anarchism that it's
possible for a civilised person to be, and religion tries to shake us out of
this condition.
It makes little use of rational argument, for that has little impact on people
holding this attitude. It appeals to them in their own terms, offering immense
personal advantage eternal blessedness, and often worldly benefits too if they
will only love and followthe superhuman leader. Presented as a person, with all
the immediacy that implies, this hero-figure yet reaches far beyond the sphere
of merely personal affairs. He is engaged in the universal struggle between good
and evil (in Buddhism the quest for Nirvana), so that those who follow him find
themselves carried into a wider sphere of activity. Religion brings people to
take part in affairs that turn out eventually to be social, and it thereby lifts
them over the first step on the climb towards anarchism.
Once we join a movement, any movement, once we step into line behind a leader,
any leader, our unquestioning submission to the state starts to break down.
Totalitarian states gain that title from their attempts to suppress every
activity in any way independent of the state, churches among them, and they do
this because every movement, even an authoritarian, conservative,
government-supporting established Church, forms a distinct power-centre
possessing a degree of autonomy; the people who choose to join a Church thereby
begin todistinguish themselves from the state. Thomas Beckett was only one of
many turbulent priests. Christ told his followers to pay to Caesar what belongs
to Caesar, but his teaching had raised the question.Once Christians began to
think about what was due to Caesar, instead of just paying it, Caesar no longer
enjoyed his former security. Some of the biggest early states, Egypt and China
for example, operated as theocracies under a divine ruler, state and church
merged together.Yet even here a distinction appears; priests busy collecting
taxes cannot at the same time perform religious ceremonies, and this difference
of function leads to structural distinction, the church hiving off from the
state. Once a distinct church with its own hierarchy has appeared, then
pluralism is on the way, to be followed by democracy, and whether the priests
like it or not, whether they know it or not, these bring anarchism behind them.
In a recent issue of Freedom Donald Rooum has a cartoon that makes the point,
though he may not have meant it in quite this way. A preacher smugly condemns
the Irish bombers as godless, selfish, anarchic and cowardly. Donald's
hairtrigger heroine, Wildcat, goes through the roof at this, protesting that
it's just the opposite of the truth. The bombers are highly disciplined,
prepared to sacrifice themselves. Far from being godless or anarchic they are
religious, potential martyrs, the very stuff of which the Church is made. We can
say the same of other terrorists. They are not anarchists, but neither are they
simply accepting what they find around them; by standing up and fighting it they
show the beginnings of independent individuality. When people choose to attack a
government, even if they do so in support of another one, and however misguided
they may be in their reasons or their methods, they approach closer to anarchism
than the great numbers who simply accept the state. Everybody who takes up
religion sets out along that same path, even though few of them go beyond verbal
dissidence and many never have occasion to realise the distinction between
church and state.
We'll get to anarchism in just a minute. First, look as fascism. Here the Leader
comes about as close to deification as civilisation permits and, significantly,
Nazism tried to set up rituals and institutions replacing orthodox religion.
Move along to conservatism, and the leader-figure, although still prominent,
starts to shrink. Where Hitler set himself above the law, Major submits to it;
he and his ministers can doubtless find gaps to wriggle through, but they can't
just ride over it. In conservatism impersonal institutions, things like law,
tradition, parliament, the monarchy, start to attract the loyalty enjoyed in
fascism by the Leader. In the more thoughtful movements, in liberalism, h
umanism, freethought, socialism, atheism, communism, the leader shrinks
movements all differ from religion, but they all carry forward the pattern of
behaviour that religion introduced, offering something bigger than ourselves and
urging us to join it. As they become more critical of present society the god,
the hero, the personal se things occupy the position once held by God and later
by the personal leader. Anarchism retains the pattern of behaviour first
introduced by religion.
Anarchists will sometimes go along with this far enough to agree that religion
has had its uses, while arguing that now it has become a burden we would be
better without. They would do away with it, explaining to people in the first
place why it's better to go straight for anarchism. Their efforts in this
direction have not met with overwhelming success,and the reason begins to appear
when we compare the mass media with anarchist publications. On the one hand,
pictures and personalities. Television, almost wholly pictorial and the supreme
mass medium, is lso the one which comes closest to presenting actual people as
we meet them in daily life, and this holds good especially for the programmes
which draw the mass audiences. Coronation Street, EastEnders, Neighbours,all the
great popular successes which run and run, present stories if real people,
identifiable personalities whom the audience can get to know almost as they know
their own families, people living ordinary lives with just enough of the unusual
to add dramatic novelty. The mass-circulation newspapers follow suit to the best
of their abilities. On one ordinary day recently a count showed the Sun and
Today, taken together, averaging approximately two pictures to the page,
excluding cartoons and advertisements. Most of these were large, from a
quarter-page upwards, and almost without exception they showed named people,
personalpeople. As mass entertainment, literature comes a poor second to the
pictorial media but here, too, the works winning the big sales almost invariably
offer stories of people presented as individual personalities.
Anarchism, too, takes great interest in people, but from a different angle. The
individual anarchism speaks of will never burgle you or break a truncheon over
your head, but it will never sleep with you or buy you a drink either; it is not
a concrete human being at all but a sexless, classless, colourless, jobless,
ageless, raceless, featureless, impersonal abstraction, quite as real as the
person immediately apparent to the senses, but in a different way; it has the
same sort of reality as the average family with two-and-a-bit children. In the
ordinary course of daily life anarchists take the normal interest in people as
persons; this is fundamental and it does not disappear in the course of
development. But when they act or speak as anarchists, when they apply the
results of their thinking, when the anarchist movement or anarchist journals
concern themselves with particular people, they do so less for the sake of their
personal qualities than or their value as symbols or instances, either of
oppression and suffering or of resistance to these. Anarchism interests itself
less in persons than in ideas, concepts of freedom, hierarchy, anarchy, the
state and the like. These abstractions cannot be pictured, and as one
consequence of this anarchist publications consist mainly of cold print.
On the one hand the mass media, offering pictures and personalities virtually
without ideas. On the other anarchism, offering ideas with rarely a personality
or a picture. And between them, offering ideas in the form of_ pictures and
personalities, forming a bridge between the other two, stands religion.
Each of the great religions offers personifications of its ideals, unded by
minor entities, saints and the like, presenting secondary features. Unifying
concrete and abstract, these figures provide a route from the primal interest in
personalities towards the sophistication of a commitment to general ideas; in
philosophical terms, from the particular to the universal.Opening the way to
individual development transcending its own limitations, religion performs a
similar function in social affairs. It has been largely the religious people
insisting, against all attempts at suppression, on giving voice to their
particular doctrines, who have established the rights and liberties that now
enable anarchism to function. Buddhist monks have immolated themselves in
protest against attempts at suppression; Christian martyrs have suffered at the
pillory and the stake for the suppress other faiths, and even in the most
advanced countries today this tradition continues in a milder form, each
congregation seeking to impose its own regime on the schools. Milton's
Areopagitica with its subtitle A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicens'd Printingis
a foundation document here. He is already near the limits of orthodoxy, perhaps
beyond them, yet his work still shows, alongside the courage and determination
that supported the movement for freedom in religious affairs, also the
narrowness of its intentions. He would restrict permissible dissidence to
Protestant sects, excluding Roman Catholicism and banning freethought: `that
also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners no law
can possibly permit. When feeling enthusiasm for his famous declaration, in the
same work, that a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit', one
needs to enquire rather carefully just what he meant by `good' in this
connection. Milton was no humanist. He and his fellows would have been horrified
to learn that they were ensuring a considerable degree of freedom for anarchism
to operate, but their efforts have produced that result. And their success in
promoting the freedoms of speech, publication and assembly arose, very largely,
from the fact that they were not revolutionaries, outside the pale, but
adherents of a respectable religion, people committed not to human welfare, or
rationality, or freedom, but to religious beliefs. The freedoms anarchists now
use arose as a side-effect of authoritarian religion.
I don't say a word against atheism, rationalism, reason and argument in their
place. We need them among ourselves, and we need them for dealing with people
who are anywhere near becoming anarchists. But they offer little help in getting
anybody started, in arousing the first awareness that things are wrong in the
world and we ought to be doing something about them. For that you need the
power, the emotion and the drive that religion brings to bear.
Religion as we have known it for so long goes sharply against anarchist beliefs,
using authority rather than reason. It recognises your freedom to accept or
reject it, but adds that if you make the wrong choice you will burn in hell. (In
Buddhism, that you will remain bound and suffering on the wheel.) Offering a
love prepared to destroy your body for the good of your soul, it operates on a
level that bypasses the ordinary attachment to comfort and custom, using images
and symbols making their appeal to deep levels of the psyche. Even so, it
failsat least as often as it succeeds, many remaining absorbed in their own
affairs, taken up with pictures and personalities, immersed unquestioningly in
the state, throughout their lives. (And of those who do start on and principles,
once it has kick-started you into accepting responsibility instead of just
taking life and society and rulers for granted, then other movements can
usefully approach you, movements more thoughtful than religion, more analytical,
more critical. As those movements, one after another, show themselves incapable
of doing what they aim at, as liberalism, freethought, socialism, atheism and
communism all fail to bring any rapid and radical improvement, eventually
anarchism gets its chance. But it is religion, more than anything else, that
gets these changes started.
A great many anarchists believe that people have a natural tendency towards
anarchy but get turned away from it, religion being one of the forces
responsible. This has no more validity than the equivalent belief of
conservatives, fascists, communists and in fact the members of every political
movement, that people generally would support them if only some evil influence
bosses, extremists, agitators, Jews or immigrants did not interfere. For people
to live togetherwithout external government they need a high level of
self-control, and we are not born with this. It has to be learnt, and religion,
ordinary, orthodox, conventional, authoritarian religion, is the most effective
method yet found for getting that learning process started.
Let me wind up with two quotations from one of the more prominent religious
authorities of recent times. In his novel . When, then, men for the first time
look upon the world of politics or religion ... they have no consistency in
their argument; that is, they argue one way to-day, and not exactly the other
way to-morrow, but indirectly the other way, at random. Their lines of argument
diverge; nothing comes to a point; there is no one centre in which their mind
sits, on which their judgement of men and things proceeds. This is the state of
many men all through life; and ruled by others, or are pledged to a course. Else
they are at the mercy of the winds and the waves; and, without being Radical,
Whig, Tory or Conservative, High Church or Low Church, they do Whig acts, Tory
acts, Catholic acts, and heretical acts, as , a likeable, easy-going young
student of divinity, begins to experience the effect upon his thinking of a
serious commitment to religion:
Contradictions could not both be real; when an affirmative was true, a negative
was false. All doctrines could not be equally sound; there was a right and a
wrong. The theory of dogmatic truth, as opposed to latitudinarianism (he did not
know their names or their history, or suspect what was going on within him) had
... gradually rise in his mind.
That is how religion works on people who have been content to get by as best
they can. It gets them started on facing the big issues and making responsible
decisions. People who think in the way Newman describes, accepting doctrine and
dogma, are not anarchists, but such thinking forms a stage in the progression
towards anarchism, for only to the extent that people formulate their ideas
clearly, and hold them firmly, can they appreciate the force of an attack upon
them.
Let us hope that Newman's young hero went on to become an anarchist. 

Notes
E. Conze, 1957,Buddhism, its Essence and DevelopmentOxford: Bruno Cassirer, page
43
J.H. Newman, 1986 (1864), Loss and Gain, Oxford: OUP, pages 15-16 and 27 

