REVIEW: JESUS AND THE ABOLITIONISTS

Jesus and the Abolitionists: How Anarchist Christianity Empowers the People
By Terry J. Stokes
Broadleaf Books, 173 pp.

Terry Stokes’ newly released volume with Broadleaf Books—Jesus and the Abolitionists—fans the flame of the burning bush. Building on his brisk Spotify podcast series and playful Prayers for the People (Convergent, 2021), we further meet a prophetic theologian of militant love.  

Rooted in Blackness, Stokes describes his hermeneutical lens of Christian anarchy as “merely the political dimension of love” (171). Standing alongside and on the shoulders of W.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction (1935), Stokes often cites the Black Church for its anarchic heritage of restorative justice and mutual aid as “an active outpouring of the recognition we’ve always had—that the state is obsolete” (158). By frequently speaking of the need to obsolesce the state, Stokes preaches with the unique authority of the Spirit moving Black theologians to witness and prophesy a restorative way forward. 

Jesus and the Abolitionists presents God not as a ruler, but a lover in love with humanity. If biblical visions of God dominating and punishing humanity sound more like the voice of historical rulers of the ruled, Stokes inverts such coercive interpretations with a hermeneutic of care: God appeals and invites us to care for rather than rule each other. In place of a legal framework of sin, reinforced by a state, we can practice an empathetic framework of resolving harm in solidarity. “As soon as we reconnect with the empathy that is at the root of our humanity—[…] we rise up and throw off structures, systems, language, and concepts that do not acknowledge our feelings and do not meet our needs” (63). By emphasizing our innate goodness from God, Stokes shows us how to abolish “the ‘states’ in our heads,” thereby freeing us to love (61).

With deft and dazzling turns, Stokes rebuilds a biblical vision of the human one from an origin of goodness, by which fundamental love and cooperation supplant supremacy. His implication for Jesus’ atonement is seismic. Rather than ecclesial rulers brokering binary atonement models—of Jesus substituting himself for our sin, vanquishing cosmic evil, or divinizing humanity—Stokes revives an early church atonement model of Jesus’ moral influence. One hears in this model of moral influence an emphasis on how to be with God in each other: a practice of deep regard to engage together. We’re born again into “a new life resurrected from alienation and scarcity, alive in solidarity and abundance” (67). We’re saved from “the obstruction of the inherent divinity we were created with and for” (67). We’re forgiven “in a relational sense, not in a legal sense” (67). When our focus turns to each other’s needs and restoring harm, our innate goodness in God guides us perfectly.

Anyone hearing this book’s subtitle “How Anarchist Christianity Empowers the People” might do a double-take. Anarchist Christianity? Isn’t anarchy antithetical to the Divine? One raised in traditional Christianity might grow up to associate anarchy with atheism, radicalization, or picture scenes of chaos and mob violence. But Stokes intercepts such misunderstanding from the very beginning to remind that anarchy simply means non-rulership. He rejects any revolutionary violence and insists on limitless goodness. Looking to anarchist Christians like Leo Tolstoy and Vernard Eller, who articulated absolute nonviolence in the name of Christ but who also demystified the Spirit, Stokes proposes a deep spirituality implicit in God-centered anarchy: the free and mutual love and active regard for each other, without need of a state: the Kin’dom of God.

Stokes presents a rigorous case for how anarchies have already existed in secular and biblical history.  With examples ranging from ancient Athens to early modern communal models in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, and the U.S., Stokes shows how cities and municipalities have internally organized around mutual aid, apart from overarching states. More interesting are Stokes’ examples from biblical history. By contrasting God’s intention to be the center of human life—authentic anarchy—with social disasters of rulership—the Tower of Babel, Judges, and Jewish kings—Stokes offers compelling evidence of when biblical people reorganized their communities without hierarchy. We see something of this in the books of Nehemiah and Ezra, when the Jewish exiles returned to collectively rebuild their ancestral land. Even then, internal dissent caused by generational trauma and “colonized minds,” compromised their movement. Stokes warns us of this today, if we’re to rebuild our communities around care and solidarity, and goes on to offer horizontal emphases of the Mosaic law and its “remix” through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Any Christian pushback that anarchy is a pipe dream or impossible has to answer to Stokes’ summary of early church history flowing out of Pentecost as “the creation of a movement of communities that have seen a viable alternative to the ethics and systems of the empire and have committed to building that different society together” (106). Stokes’ hermeneutic wrests communal hope from state hopelessness.

Something familiar emerges from Stokes’ honesty with our malaise. He reminds us how our faith ancestors have lived from God as their center, rather than a ruler. They held this together. By demonstrating how anarchically Jesus and those with him lived and moved, and how diverse, early church communities grew in strength without an external authority, Stokes critiques the transition when the Roman Empire co-opted Christianity into its statecraft. The result? “By and large, christianity fairly quickly goes from being an anarchic, ethical, radical religious movement to being a bureaucratic, corrupt, status quo-keeping state institution” (115). As simple as this might sound, Stokes essentializes everything that has come to discredit Christian imperialism today since its inception as a state religion and lays bare why people have left or are leaving the church en masse. What exactly are people rejecting? Jesus or rulers? Because of the hypocrisy of the Christian state in any age, people can hardly hear the gospel in its context of radical care and solidarity. By his hermeneutic dismantling the state and setting in its place no-state, Stokes’ anarchy revives the love for God we had at first. 

With all of the love one might feel, where does one put it today? Where may love most benefit? Jesus and the Abolitionists is a clarion call to organize. Stokes speaks prophetically for a generation of what he calls “‘exvangelicals,’ church exoduses, and church hurt,” accounting for how myriad Christian millennials are migrating from organized religion (117). For what is this or any generation spiritually searching? Perhaps the most literal, communal meaning of Emmanuel—God With Us. But where, in a polarizing, escalating society such as ours, of such extreme statists left and right, will Jesus’ people find each other? Stokes’ certainty in the anarchy of Jesus shows us how crises will bond some of us into local collectives of mutual aid, care, and solidarity—who agree on each other’s innate goodness—to stand together in light, despite fire.