Blessed Are the Peacemakers: The Contribution of Christian Nonviolence to Anarchism

Although Christian anarchists are typically committed to pacifism, in the broader anarchist literature pacifism is a decidedly minoritarian position. It may be argued on this basis that Christian anarchists are pacifists on account of their Christianity rather than their anarchism, and that non-Christian anarchists, in not sharing Christians’ commitment to following Jesus, have no similar reason to accept pacifism. However, this paper argues that the radical nonviolence defended by Christian anarchists is as consistently anarchist as it is Christian, for in Christian nonviolence we find anarchistic commitments to mutual aid, prefiguration, and attention to ‘the least of these’. The paper therefore also suggests that the criticisms of violence articulated by Christian anarchists might actually speak to non-Christian anarchists too, and that nonviolence is in fact a central element of anarchist prefiguration.