Broadleaf Books
In Jesus and the Abolitionists, Terry Stokes fuses the Gospels with anarchist theory and finds them not just compatible but deeply simpatico.
Stokes is not necessarily the person you might expect to be writing a book like this. He grew up in the 1990s and the first part of the twenty-first century in a Black bourgeois household and a conservative evangelical Christian environment, where he admits he felt quite comfortable. After graduating from Yale, he attended Princeton Theological Seminary. It was “the first progressive christian space I’d ever inhabited,” he writes—one where he “was confronted with women pastors, LGBTQ+ theologians, and a host of people and experiences that forced me to examine my beliefs about gender and sexuality, which led to even more fundamental questions about God, divine revelation, and christian ethics.” (Stokes deliberately spells the word “Christian” in lowercase throughout the book.)
Jesus and the Abolitionists: How Anarchist Christianity Empowers the People
By Terry J. Stokes
Broadleaf Books, 173 pages
Release date: May 28, 2024
He graduated with a master of divinity degree in 2020 into a world in which the COVID-19 pandemic had pulled the mask off social and economic inequities and a new “iteration of the Black liberation movement” had erupted in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.
A job at a progressive, socially and politically active church followed, and his theology having moved left, his politics soon followed: embracing socialism, reading W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis and following them into communism, and finally, through Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid and the writings of Murray Bookchin and others, adopting anarchist philosophy.
Stokes explains exactly the sort of anarchism that he follows—both nonviolent and fundamentally systematic. His chapter breaking down the concept describes an organic social structure, centered in densely populated communities, that operates through local, collective, voluntary networks and organizations without the dictates of a larger, external state.
“Anarchy brings the economy out of the private sphere, as in capitalism, or a separate sphere, as in authoritarian socialism, and into the public sphere,” he writes. “Economic policy, like all policy, is crafted by the entire community in face-to-face relationships working toward the common good.”
Stokes considers anarchism an existential necessity for his own Black identity: “I am rooted in Blackness as, among other things, a condition of ontological ungovernability and anti-state orientation.” But it also becomes deeply interwoven with his Christian faith. Explaining why he embraces the term “anarchist christians” and rejects its obverse, “christian anarchists,” he writes in a footnote, “I see christianity as being anarchic rather than qualifying anarchism.”
He goes on to build a systematic theology that considers the Bible through an anarchist hermeneutic. From Genesis through the Gospels, he breaks down traditional interpretations and reconstructs them from an anarchist perspective. Take the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden (an allegory, Stokes emphasizes—not literal prehistory). Stokes interprets the forbidden fruit as a symbol of “self-supremacy,” chosen over mutual solidarity. (Remember how, when they’re caught, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the snake?)
“The ‘curses’ of Genesis 3 are allegorical representations of the universal consequences of the ways in which humans have chosen to act and construct their societies around the value of supremacy, repeatedly rejecting God’s appeals to us to exercise our own agency in service of care,” Stokes writes.
From the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Judges—“the graphic, detailed demonstration of the truth that decentralization without ethics quickly leads to utter chaos”—to the backstory of Paul’s famous pronouncement about love in his letter to the church of Corinth, Stokes manages to mine lessons that, on reflection, are quietly relevant to his anarchist message.
The audience that Stokes is writing for appears more likely to be Christians who are curious about anarchism than anarchists curious about Christianity. The book is a quick read, with a breezy style that will go down easy for some while others may find it simply cloying. A risk is that readers might overlook the complexity and sophistication of his theological reflections.
Make no mistake, though, he’s quite serious in his contention that the anarchist society he describes—and that he finds illuminated by lessons in scripture—is a genuine prospect for humanity, whether Christian or not.