Attack The System: An Interview with Todd Lewis

http://attackthesystem.com/2013/11/28/attack-the-system-an-interview-with-todd-lewis/

This is a long but interesting podcast. I appreciate the viewpoints of the guest. Anarchism is little understood in Christian circles, particularly those that are Conservative and wish to defend some form of the old establishment order.

I would argue Biblical Christianity will always be incompatible with any kind of establishment order. The minute Christianity becomes mainstream, respectable, bourgeois...then it's become the world and embraced values completely contrary to the New Testament ethic. At that point it has 'made a home' and eschewed pilgrim status.

Anarchism embraces a wide spectrum of ideas, some of them completely incompatible with Christianity, but of course I would say the same about the political outlooks and goals of the Christian Right in the United States. How nationalistic militarism and capitalism became identified with Christianity can be explained in sociological terms but in no way reflects what the Bible teaches.

Christian Anarchism will view the state as Babylon and rejects all forms of Constantinianism as heretical and a betrayal of Christ's Kingdom. Thus as citizens in Babylon what are our hopes and expectations? The guest on this show is probably a little more optimistic than I would be.  I'm not looking for solutions. I don't think we can find a niche in this world. We will always be hated fools.

In terms of this age I'm ultimately looking for a Church divorced from power and a restraint of the establishment social powers. That would include both the state and the private powers (plutocratic or oligarchic) that attempt to accumulate power.

There is no such a thing as a Christian political order. While I would probably resonate most with forms of anarcho-socialism, in no way would I argue it represents a Christian political structure. It's a stop-gap measure, a negative that seeks only to check some of the effects of the fall. It's a paradigm that limits power. I don't want the American Military Empire to run the world, but I don't want to hand it over to Wal-Mart, Exxon, State Farm or Goldman Sachs either. Unfortunately for the world the two sectors have wed and created the most powerful (and yet volatile) empire the world has yet seen.

Whatever restrains the Beast impulses of the pagans who control the 'powers' on earth and doesn't destroy the downtrodden will work... until it doesn't. And then the slate will have to be wiped clean and something else will have to be tried.

I believe strongly in something I call the Sociological Dynamic Principle. I believe all political and economic models fail because they're theories are created in the sanitized environment of the ivory tower. When applied to the world there are instantly hundreds if not thousands of variables that enter into play which quickly compromise and destroy the ideology behind the theory. If it does work, it's for a short period of time, a generation at the most. By then forces have changed and it must be not only tweaked but often re-cast.

I realize some will argue the 'market' allows for such dynamism, but Market Economics utterly fail to take into account human suffering and dignity, political stability and responsibility (think the 2008 crisis) and like many other false systems embraces a completely unbiblical notion that man will not seek to subvert the system, rig the game, and destroy others in the process. It's a pagan system rooted in a false anthropology and a pagan survival-of-the-fittest ethic.

Unlike the guest, I'm not terribly interested in defining the state via Aristotle or Plato, or looking at ideas like virtue in the sociological context. I think it's more helpful as Christians to formulate our definitions (even if minimalist) from Scripture itself. The Western Tradition while fascinating and rich is dangerous when syncretised with selective Biblical concepts. Antithesis is our watchword. As long as we're rejecting pride, security and respectability, which as Christians we must...we will always be on the fringe of the social order. Mind you, the values I just mentioned are the hallmark of what it means to be Middle Class. Am I saying those values are completely incompatible with the Christian life and Biblical ethics? Yes.

The guest rightly identifies the heart of Anarchism as voluntarism and indeed the surviving Anabaptists represent this view as Christians vis-a-vis the state.

Sadly, within their own circles they have enshrined the Ordnung, the legalistic code determined by the Elders, which is a form of legalistic tyranny and an abuse of ecclesiastical authority.

Overall it's an interesting show. You might the try the first twenty minutes or so. It may surprise you.