Annie the Anarchist

Annie Black is a lady at my church. She would not call herself an anarchist, but if it flies like a duck and swims like a duck …

She is the embodiment of what Christian anarchists, all two dozen of us, are trying to see as normal for the body of Christ.

Annie has two lovely and musically talented daughters. One day, for reasons probably related to those daughters, Annie decided what our church needed this spring was a handbell choir. So she went and recruited players and a director. She sent reminders for people to come to rehearsals. She made sure there were snacks at rehearsals, which involved getting the people who are responsible for music at the church to pony up money for said snacks. She may even have been the one to negotiate which Sunday the bells are to play in the Sunday service.

When it comes to rehearsal time, Annie is usually elsewhere, but the director she has chosen is able to keep the rehearsal moving and the players on task. It is not a professional ensemble by any means, but it is sure to draw a few positive comments from the audience for its performance.

All this without threats or any other form of coercion or even tangible reward for anyone (unless sandwiches count). I don’t remember her even saying so much as, “This is my project.”

This is anarchy in action. It is proof, or at least strong evidence, that anything worth doing can be done without coercion. If the Annie Blacks of the world put their minds to it, they could come up with ways of educating children, keeping poor people fed and healthy, and probably even defending the innocent from violence, all without resorting to the coercion inherent in the state.

Compare this to what our detractors call anarchy: warlords in Mogadishu running around with machine guns mounted on trucks, fighting over territory and trying to become the head archōn. At its worst, that’s chaos, but since there is no pretense there of people and their property being sacred, it is not anarchy. However, it should be noted that the more chaotic the situation is the less wealth there is for those archōns to extract from those over whom they are the powers that be, ordained of God, so it is in their best interest to make the situation as peaceful as possible and allow those under their boots to engage in productive labor. Whether they actually do so or not, I don’t know, and the statist Western media has no ideological incentive to treat the situation there sympathetically, so I’m not sure where one would go to find out—except, of course, to Mogadishu, in which case one would have the CIA, no friend of anarchy or innocent life, to contend with.

Annie Black is no warlord. She is what we should all aim to be: influential and willing to serve. As the church relies on the Annie Black model for modeling society, we will see the church grow and everyone live better. May her tribe increase.